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ECONOMIC ESSAYS, 



BY 



WALTER S. WALDIE. 



Price 50 cents. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

1886. 







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12 



ECONOMIC ESSAYS UPON THE RELATION 



OF MAN TO PROPERTY. 



FROM THE 



STANDPOINT OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. 




BY 

WALTER S. WALDIE. 




PHILADELPHIA : 

PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR. 

814 N. Eleventh St. 

1886. 



tt^'l 



.1 



V 



COPTEIGHT BY 

WALTER S. WALDIE. 
1886. 



Collins Printing House, 
705 Jayne St. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

False Teachers 5 

Association and its Instrument . . . .13 

Banks AND Banking 19 

Intrinsic Value . .25 

Buy Cheap and Sell Dear 31 

Subsidies 38 

Land 45 

Labor 51 

Wages 58 

The Social Arrangements of a People must Har- 
monize WITH THEIR Political Principles . . 65 

Liquidation of Bonded Debt 72 

Political Action .81 

Dedication 87 



ERRATUM. 



On fourtli line from foot of page 76, read $100 — amount of one year's 
interest, instead of $80. 



I 



FALSE TEACHERS. 

We find in the curriculum of nearly every colle- 
giate institution in the United States a branch of 
study called Social Science, and as these colleges 
have great influence in forming public opinion it is 
proper we should examine the authorities upon which 
this so-called social science has been established, and 
also to examine how compatible its teachings are 
with the ideas of our American Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. 

The original source of inspiration of every text- 
book used in colleges is the work of Adam Smith, a 
Scotchman, who published it in 1776, under the title, 
"The Cause and Nature of the Wealth of Nations." 
He honestly refrained from calling his book anything 
else than what it was — a treatise on the development 
of wealth, in which he ignores man except as a ma- 
chine for the accumulation of wealth to those havino^ 
money to invest, and plainly tells those who do the 
physical labor and drudgery in developing wealth, 
that "they have no reason to expect a greater share 
of the products of their labor than sufficient to main- 
tain a mere animal existence and raise a new genera- 
tion of workers." 
2 



6 FALSE TEACHERS. 

If we regard social science as the science which 
teaches man how to associate himself with his fellow- 
men and develop his intellectual and spiritual facul- 
ties, which distinguish him from the brute creation, 
then Adam Smith's book has not the shadow of a 
claim as a treatise on social science which our college 
professors have given it. Adam Smith cannot be 
censured for writing as he did at the time, for he 
lived under a government whose cardinal principle 
is the superiority of property over life ; a government 
that would expatriate a man for hooking a salmon, but 
gives a man six months' imprisonment for beating his 
wife to death. Despotism does not permit of opposi- 
tion, and Smith and his book would have been expa- 
triated, as Priestley was, had his book contained one 
plea for humanity. Yerily a strange book for Ame- 
rican college professors to expound from ! 

English government being almost incessantly at 
war with some nation, and pauperism being on the 
increase among her own subjects, some excuse had to 
be made to appease the suffering victims. The Kev. 
E. T. Malthus, a member of the English Established 
Church, did this service in his work, "Principles of 
Population," by help of which his readers might, as 
they were assured, understand the causes "of the 
poverty and misery observable among the lower 
classes of the people in every nation," and of "the 
repeated failures in the efforts of the higher classes 
to relieve them." Mr. Malthus's invention consisted 
in claiming that the Creator had established a great 
law which relieved the favored wealthier classes from 
all responsibility for the poverty and misery prevalent 



FALSE TEACHERS. 7 

among the people, and enabled them to close their 
purses and even their hearts against the commonest 
dictates of charity, comforting themselves with the 
reflection that if they should in any manner " stand 
between the error and its consequences," or "inter- 
cept the penalty" affixed to the procreation of their 
species by those who had not accumulated the sup- 
port for children — which 'penalty was poverty^ wretched- 
ne55, and death — they would but " perpetuate the sin,"' 
and thereby become themselves participants in the 
crime. This theory satisfied the rich that they might 
safely and conscientiously " eat, drink, and be merry," 
though surrounded by poverty, disease, and death. 

The ground plan of the Malthusian theory is that 
population increases as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc., while sub- 
sistence can be only increased 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., conse- 
quently wars, pestilences, and famines were virtues — 
benefits, and not evils — as they prevented starvation 
by reducing population down to the food standard. 
This theory was not sustained by any logical proof, 
but it was so completely in accord with English des- 
potism and greed of wealth among the governing 
class that it was received without a dissenting voice 
and transferred to American colleges as being good 
orthodox teaching. 

Daniel Kicardo, a Jew, born in Amsterdam, quar- 
relled with his father and went to London, where he 
made an immense fortune in stock gambling, and, 
after apostatizing from the Hebrew faith, bought his 
election to a seat in Parliament, and wrote a book 
supporting the blasphemous Malthusian doctrine of 
surplus population. He asserted, contrary to all truth^ 



8 FALSE TEACHEES. 

that original settlers occupied the richest lands, forcing 
all new comers to accept inferior, lands, consequently 
starvation for the last generation was only a question 
of time. 

That the theories of Smith, Malthus, and Eicardo 
are in accord with the spirit of the governing class in 
England is demonstrated by the following extract 
from the London Times, the leading organ of the 
English aristocracy: — 

" For a whole generation man has heen a drug in 
this country, and populatio7i a nuisance. It has scarcely 
ever entered into the heads of economists that they 
would ever have to deal with a deficiency of labor. 
The inexhaustible Irish supply has kept down the 
price of English labor, whether in the field, the rail- 
way, the factory, the army, or the navy ; whether at 
the sickle, the spade, the hoe, or the desk. We be- 
lieve that, for fifty years at least, Jahor^ tahing its qual- 
ity into account^ has been cheaper in this country than 
in any ^ar^ of Europe^ and that this cheapness of labor 
has contributed vastly to the improvement and power 
of the country, to the success of mercantile pursuits, 
and to the enjoyment of those who have money to spend.^"* 

While it is natural for English aristocracy to accept 
the teachings of Smith, Malthus, and Eicardo, it is 
unnatural that such doctrines should be the ground 
plan for text-books on social science adopted in nearly 
every educational institution in this country. The 
secret may be explained in the fact that college pro- 
fessors, as Perry and Sumner ; Congressmen, as Oar- 
lisle, Watterson, Morrison, etc., have salaries to spend, 



FALSE TEACHERS. 9 

and thej want a system that makes it "good for those 
who have money to spend." 

It is impossible for like causes to fail in producing 
the same results upon a people, .be they subjects of a 
monarchy or citizens of a republic ; and .as it is the 
social, much more than in the political, relations 
where the heel of oppression is most grinding, it is 
self-evident that illogical dogmas invented and 
patented for the use of the vilest government upon 
earth — England — cannot be suited to the education 
of American students. 

It is to these false teachings that we owe the dis- 
cordant conditions now existing in nearly every 
branch of productive industry between employer 
and employed, falsely called a conflict between capi- 
tal and labor, but which is in reality a bitter feud of 
the creditor class against the debtor and producing 
class, to which feud the employer is as great a slave 
as the employed. The creditor class dictates how 
much money shall be disbursed as wages, and em- 
ployes have to scramble for their share. The diffi- 
culty of getting hampers the disbursing, causing re- 
ductions on one side and strikes on the other, and 
will continue until employer and employed combine, 
instead of fighting each other, to compel equity be- 
tween debtor and creditor. This equity between 
debtor and creditor can only be attained by destroy- 
ing the English policy of making man subservient to 
property instead of property subservient to man. 
College professors and English gold have given the 
English system the ascendency in our national legisla- 
tion. The power pf the creditor class is disguised by 

2* 



10 FALSE TEACHEES. 

a systematic arrangement of delusions, believed in by 
the ignorant and connived at by the intelligent but 
unscrupulous, which it will be the object of these 
essays to expose. 

England is per se the capitalistic nation of the 
world, while the United States, with its immense 
natural resources, yet in infantile course of develop- 
ment, is the labor nation. England's policy is to keep 
the world in debt to her, because as a creditor nation 
she can dictate prices for such crude materials as she 
chooses to purchase to utilize her coal in driving 
machinery. Depressing her own labor to the mini- 
mum point of existence, she forces the same mini- 
mum animal existence, devoid of every intellectual 
aspiration, upon every nation who buys her manufac- 
tures. The condition of the people of India, Egypt, 
Turkey, and Ireland should be a warning beacon to 
Americans not to allow themselves to be debtors to 
England by purchasing her productions, no matter 
how nominally low the price may be. It is the smile 
of the harlot sure to end in destruction of industrial 
and political independence ; for depressed labor in the 
United States will produce an American aristocratic 
oligarchy, just as certainly as that depressed labor in 
England supports a landed aristocracy. 

The late Southern slaveholders understood the 
value of an open market for English manufactures as 
being the best support for their peculiar institution. 
They saw the close alliance of hired labor dependent 
upon English capital, and their personal chattel labor. 

It has been openly proclaimed in New York City 
-r-a vassalage of England — by some of the leading 



FALSE TEACHERS. 11 

citizens, that the American laborer has no right to 
expect any better condition of life than that of the 
English laborer, but the Beechers, Goes, and other 
believers in this doctrine do not offer anv evidence in 
support of it ; the mere assertion of such honorable 
men is sufficient to silence all doubt upon the subject. 
Colleges are mainly supported by those "who have 
money to spend," and professors must be in accord 
with the views of their patrons. Is the condition of 
English laborers such an enviable one that Americans 
should ignore their great natural and political advan- 
tages and accept the dregs of feudalism existing in 
England to day? 

Every dollar of a debt due abroad is a manacle 
upon American labor, for it is labor that pays every 
dollar of deht^ foreign or domestic, and however remiss 
our national legislation, misled by the false teachings 
of college professors, has been in regard to preserving 
equity between domestic debtors and creditors, it is 
only adding fuel to the fire by permitting the English 
manufacturer to add his burden upon American labor 
by our buying English goods. 

Between such antagonistic principles as exist be- 
tween monarchy and democracy, there must be a 
barrier between the industrial products of the two 
countries, because unrestrained competition will re- 
duce Americans to the English standard. As import 
duties are paid by the foreign manufacturer, and not 
by the American consumer, the cheapest and most 
certain barrier is a high import duty, which has 
always cheapened the article to the American con- 
sumer and helped the American manufacturer. 



12 FALSE TEACHERS. 

If, by any means, we can exclude that infernal 
piratical curse of the world, England, from inter- 
ference with our domestic industries, our domestic 
grievances could be soon adjusted, for the American 
ballot can control American legislation, but cannot 
influence English, though English gold is lavishly ex- 
pended in our national halls at Washington. 

A French writer truthfully describes the English 
policy as "a special science devoted to merely con- 
sidering man as an instrument of labor, ignoring his 
personal welfare, in order to produce cheaper than 
other nations. Under the influence of the doctrines 
of the English school of economists, a colossal indus- 
try has been created which fills the world with its 
manufactures. It is a vast arena where men, women, 
and children are thrown pell-mell like a regiment of 
soldiers in the heat of battle. From this ardent and 
confused mass, the result of which is to create millions 
of wealth, the strong and cunning rise to the top, 
while dishonor and ruin seize upon the weaker, and 
the great mass, deprived of security, oscillate between 
death and starvation. They treat social science as a 
question of wealth, and not as an application of nature's 
law to development of civilization as it should be." 
Our American college professors totally ignore the 
French standpoint in their blind allegiance to English 
brutality. 



13 



ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTRUMENT. 

The isolated man dependent upon his own unaided 
resources is one of the weakest creatures in existence 
in comparative ability to supply his wants ; his home 
and food are what he finds unappropriated by savage 
animals, while being himself in constant danger of 
becoming- their prey, but by association with his 
fellow-men he acquires supremacy over the forces of 
nature. 

Association is understood to be the intelligent inter- 
change of mental and physical services between indi- 
viduals, and also the combination into concentrated 
effort for public good, as being best protective of in- 
dividual safety ; herding together as buffialoes, or 
congregating in unorganized tribal communities as 
Indians, are not examples of association. 

In all of the innumerable exchanges of services 
transacted in organized communities, each individual 
has his peculiar relative value which must be acknowl- 
edged and protected by the community. To do this 
equitably requires some form of certificate expressive 
of the value of the service rendered, when such ser- 
vice is not requited by another service at the time, 
which is very rarely the case in civilized life. 

The recipient of a service becomes a debtor to him 
who has performed the service, and as the creditor 



14: ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTKUMENT. 

has to search through the communitj for some one 
who will accept the debtor's due-bill or certificate, in 
payment of such service as he may need, it is posi- 
tively necessary that 'the certificate shall be one ac- 
knowledged by the whole nation. This certificate 
does not pay a debt ; it merely asserts the ownership 
of a debt due to its possessor by the community. As 
individual debtors and creditors are being constantly 
created, the immense importance of properly con- 
structing this balancing certificate cannot be over- 
estimated. Errors in the system of creating and 
controlling this balancing certificate are, and have 
been, the most prolific agent of human misery. 

Arguing from the American standpoint of equality 
in the rights of man, however variable his capabilities 
may be, it is self-evident that this balancing certificate 
of individual indebtedness can be only equitably 
issued by an authority in which every individual has 
an equal voice in creating, which is the United States 
Congress. And as individual happiness is dependent 
upon exchange of services with his fellow-men, it is 
also self-evident that the amount of these exchanges 
should be the guiding principle in establishing the 
volume of such certificates, both in regard to the 
totality of amount and to the denominations. Any 
arbitrary decision upon either of these points cannot 
fail to impair the usefulness of the authorized certifi- 
cate. Such an arbitrary Act of Congress is equiva- 
lent in stupidity to a railroad company limiting the 
number of its cars regardless of the wants of its cus- 
tomers. 

The value of this certificate being dependent upon 



ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTRUMENT. 15 

the productive ability or wealth of the community, it 
is absurd extravagance to use an expensive material 
on which to stamp its amount of credit. Being 
merely an instrument to effect exchanges it should be 
considered in the category of all other machines or 
instruments, to be constructed at the least possible 
expense compatible with usefulness and security. 
And as its volume is an increasing one according to 
the growth of population and productive wealth, the 
selected material must be capable of production com- 
mensurate with such growth. Enacting an issue of 
balancing certificates without having the material for 
its execution is similar to designing a building with- 
out having the materials for constructing it. 

I^early every civilized government has tried the 
experiment of a theoretic money based upon metals 
they could not create nor control, only to learn its 
utter inefficiency in times of great emergency, when 
they were obliged to use means commensurate with 
the object and coin a money out of the only material 
that all governments have at their command — public 
credit — and in every instance has this public credit 
money fulfilled every demand made upon it, and 
saved the government that created it. Public credit 
money brings the individual in closer connection with 
the public, and this close alliance is the secret of its 
great strength. 

There is little use of saving the government if the 
people are not saved, and why a money that carried 
a government through a severe emergency cannot be 
continued, after the public danger has passed, to pre- 
vent the individual people from having industrial 



16 ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTKUMENT. 

emergencies, can only be explained by legislation 
being influenced by the ignorant teachings of college 
professors not emancipated from the fossal dogmas of 
feudalism. And it is rather remarkable that monar- 
chical England and democratic United States should 
have pursued the same policy of crushing individual 
prosperity as soon as the political existeuce of the 
nation was assured. Individual prosperity is not a 
plank in the monarchical platform, therefore her 
action was perfectly consistent, but as individual 
prosperity is the most iiiportant plank in the platform 
of a republic, imitation of England's policy of crush- 
ing individual prosperity by adopting the same pro- 
cess — contraction of the balancing certificate between 
debtor and creditor — was as brutal as it was inconsis- 
tent with our Declaration of Independence, and justly 
ranks the promoters of the scheme as confederates of 
Benedict Arnold. 

Historical evidence having fully demonstrated the 
inability of our present system of supplying a balanc- 
ing certificate between the individual debtor and 
creditor, it is the part of common sense to gather 
from the past such facts as will help us to construct 
a better one. 

Barter is the basis of all business or exchanges be- 
tween individuals, and as it is the true object of every 
form of money to cheapen the means and extend the 
area of barter, it is self-evident that the paymaster of 
metal or paper money is some form of personal ser- 
vice or of productive industry. Every attempt at 
making an intermediate paymaster is a hindrance to 



ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTRUMENT. 17 

the object desired — exchange of services and commo- 
dities. 

All values in barter transactions are expressed in 
" Money of Account," whose denominations vary in 
every country, each of which has its own unit, in 
multiples of which values are expressed. The unit 
of the United States is the " mill" — an ideal unit un- 
represented by any material — one thousand of which 
constitutes the standard dollar. Upon this ideal unit 
the United States government has created an ideal 
money of gold, and a struggle is going on to take 
silver in partnership on an equal footing. 

The people are doing what business they can in 
money of account, the amount of which far exceeds 
the combination of gold and silver to supply. The 
deficiency between ideal or legal money and money 
of account compels the use of bank credit, and divides 
the nation into a 90 per cent, debtor class and a 10 
per cent, creditor class — an aristocracy without titles 
but as potent as any monarchical aristocracy with its 
ribbons and gew-gaws. 

Until the money of account of the people is balanced 
by the ideal, inefl&cient theory money of the govern- 
ment, there cannot be equity between debtor and 
creditor. The discordant conditions now existing 
in nearly every branch of productive industry are 
largely due to the feud between the ideal money of the 
government and the money of the people, or money 
of account. 

The people of the United States are daily increas- 
ing their productive ability with a corresponding in- 
crease in the money of account, while the materials 
3 



18 ASSOCIATION AND ITS INSTRUMENT. 

of the ideal money, misnamed the "precious metals," 
are as rapidly decreasing. Even with unlimited coin- 
age of silver the breach between debtor and creditor 
portions of the nation will widen. Either industry 
must merge into idleness and pauperism, as in Eng- 
land, Scotland, and Ireland, or ideal money must be 
abandoned for substitution of a money representative 
of and based upon productive industry. 

As changing a debt from an inconvenient to a con- 
venient form does not increase the amount of the 
debt, there is not any valid reason why the national 
bonds, subject to call, should not be replaced with 
national notes of small denominations. If bond- 
holders demand coin give them silver, or certificates 
of one, two, and five dollar denominations. This 
would do more to restore harmony in industrial circles 
than labor organizations can do in a century. 

It is a strange idea entertained by many that an 
interest bearing debt issued by the United States is 
more sacred than a non-interest bearing debt. If 
an interest bearing bond is good security for national 
bank notes, are not the notes made from the bonds 
and issued directly from the public treasury just as 
good as when issued through the banks? 

The word "inflation," meaning cheap money, is a 
terrible bug-a-boo to money lenders, though they are 
as callous as flint to the miseries of cheap labor. Idle 
money is harmless, but idle humanity is dangerous 
and expensive. 



19 



BANKS AND BANKING. 

There is not in the business arrangements of a 
people a subject so influential upon industrial pros- 
perity and one so little understood as this one of 
Banks and Banking. 

Starting as they did in times when individual credit 
depended more upon might than right, banks taught 
the world the immense value of organized credit in 
facilitating commerce — that valuable aid to human 
progress. Bank credit was as superior to private 
credit as a good turnpike was to a soft dirt road. 
But to-day the steel rail is supplanting the turnpike, 
and the people are now asking that the nation's credit 
shall supersede the bank credit. 

There is an absurd idea prevalent in the minds 
of many respectable people that bankers are per se 
financiers, ^. e., they are proper judges of how much 
money is needed by a community to balance indi- 
vidual transactions; and, by virtue of this delusion, 
bankers have had almost entire control over our 
national financial legislation. Bankers are not finan- 
ciers in the sense just referred to ; their business is to 
exchange their credit for private credit ; to sell their 
credit as a substitute for money, and the less money 
they can keep the government from issuing the higher 
is their charge for their credit. They advocate the 



20 BANKS AND BANKING. 

use of gold as a balancing agent because they know 
that gold can be supplied only in limited amount, and 
depreciate silver because the supply of it threatens to 
become a severe competitor against the use of their 
credit. Banks are organized to make money for their 
stockholders, and the public has no right to expect 
that banks will omit any legal means to make their 
business profitable, any more than to expect that a mer- 
chant will sell his goods below the market price. If 
productive industry is prosperous and the banks make 
money, well and good. If productive industry is not 
prosperous but the banks make money, it is also well 
and good as far as the banks are concerned. The people 
must organize for their own interest just as the banks 
do for themselves. Yitaperation of bank officers is as 
absurd as it is unjust, for bank officers are fair repre- 
sentatives of the business intelligence and integrity 
prevalent in the community. The people have the 
legislative power to create a better system. Let them 
study how to do it. 

As an active movement of what money the people 
may possess is of as much importance as having the 
money itself, common sense dictates that depositories 
for the sale of money, the same as for the sale of any 
other form of merchandise, is mutually beneficial to 
the individual and to the public. It is, tkerefore, a 
great mistake for an individual to think that any 
unused money he may have on deposit in a bank of 
discount and deposit is of no value to him. His very 
balance may be loaned to some one who becomes a 
direct customer, or, using it in some other channel, 
becomes indirectly a customer. Every dollar dis- 



BANKS AND BANKING. 21 

bursed in one channel has its influence upon every 
other channel of business. 

The volume of money has always been subject to 
some chance, as the discovery of metallic ores, etc., 
and limited in amount, while communities increase in 
population and production, creating a demand for 
money in excess of supply, and compelling the use of 
some substitute for money. Bank credit offered the 
readiest solution of the difficulty, and banks were 
authorized to issue obligations — bank notes — in excess 
of the money they had on hand. This afforded 
relief, and would have worked very well but for an 
asinine regulation that compelled the banks to pay 
all obligations, loans as well as actual deposits, in 
coin money. The absurdity of this regulation is 
apparent when we consider that bank obligations 
were sanctioned because there was not enough money 
to transact business, and, consequently, these obliga- 
tions could not he paid on demand. A bank that 
exchanges its demand obligations in excess of its 
ready money for an individual obligation payable in 
the future becomes legally insolvent^ while it is Tnorally 
solvent. Legally insolvent because it is impossible 
to pay obligations in what it does not possess and 
cannot get. It is morally solvent because the people 
owe the bank more than the bank owes the people, 
and can cancel its obligations by accepting them in 
payment of debts to it by the people. This nervous 
condition of moral solvency and legal insolvency 
keeps the money market, as it is called, in a constantly 
feverish condition, which at times burns into a sus- 
pension. That is, an honest confession of its legal 

3* 



22 BANKS AND BANKING. 

insolvency at the same time demonstrating its moral 
solvency by accepting its obligations in payment of 
debts dae to it. After the first flurry or excitement 
of suspension has subsided, bank notes and bank credit 
serve business purposes just as well as during the 
time when the absurd pretence of specie payment was 
in vogue. 

Legal enactment can limit the extent of ratio of 
bank loans to its capital, but legal authority cannot 
compel the bank to keep its loans up to giny standard. 
For instance, at this present writing the loans of the 
banks in Philadelphia are about four and one-half 
times their paid-in capital. They cannot be com- 
pelled to keep their loans up to this ratio, and if any 
public excitement occurs, as in 1857 and in 1873, the 
banks will be compelled in self-defence to call in their 
loans as speedily as possible. The vacuum in the 
money market produces a corresponding vacuum in 
the purchasing market. Prices of merchandise must 
decline proportionately to the decline in volume of 
money, but obligations for payment do not decrease 
one cent from their face value, hence the manufac- 
turer is obliged to give more goods to pay his note — 
possibly be obliged to sell goods below cost of manu- 
facture. In such a case he must either stop working 
or reduce wages. 

These fluctuations of prices, and interruptions of 
industrial activity, cannot avoid being periodical as 
long as the business movements of the people are de- 
pendent upon possessing a purchasing agent created 
and supplied from a source that has not any other 
motive to guide it except that of its own interest. 



BANKS AND BANKING. 23 

Business and not banking is the primal factor in 
the progress of a people, hence the banking or money 
power should be held by the people and be made 
subservient to business purposes. In short, those 
who create the goods should control the instrument 
that gives stability to prices ; that preserves equity 
between debtor and creditor. The people must sub- 
stitute their own credit for that of bank credit, which 
they can readily do, and have this national credit so 
firmly created that the suspension of individuals 
would not disturb any channels of business except 
those immediately connected with the bankrupts. 
The idea that a money panic should occur in the 
United States because one individual banker failed is 
about as absurd as that all property should burn 
because one house was burned. 

The periodical financial panics indicate so clearly 
the internal weakness of our present banking system 
(if it can be called a system), that it is a stigma upon 
the intelligence of our business men that they have 
not established a better one when they have the 
ballot in their control. 

In 1857 and in 1878 the financial panics scattered 
the labor organizations like chaff before the wind, 
and will scatter them again when another panic 
occurs, and there is nothing to prevent in the future 
what has occurred under the present system. 

If labor organizations would take into account 
that the ability to organize a business establishment is 
a talent possessed by comparatively few out of the 
multitude, and when such an establishment is under 
way its success depends upon the owner getting back 



24 BANKS AND BANKING. 

from the public the money he has invested in machin- 
ery, stock, and wages, they would see the necessity of 
providing means that the public can purchase the 
fruits of their labor. Under the present system, 
when the banks contract their loans, the public are 
unable to buy, and the "boss," unable to raise money 
to pay notes and wages, has to contract work by dis- 
charging hands or reducing wages. Nearly all of the 
discordant relations now existing in so many branches 
of productive industry have their origin in the declin- 
ing purchasing ability among the great mass of the 
public. 

Contrast between the labor conditions of 1865 and 
1873 should convince labor organizations that the 
purchasing ability of the public is the great protector 
of labor prosperity, and if the labor men would in- 
telligently examine into the cause of the prosperity of 
1865, and the cause of the great depression in 1873, 
they would learn that the public had nearly four 
times the purchasing ability in 1865 that it had in 
1873. It was by bank influence upon national legis- 
lation that the purchasing power of the people was so 
abridged, and until the bank power is shorn of its 
great power labor organizations are only wasting 
their time and strength. 

We must take from the banks the power to issue 
their notes, and confine them to their legitimate busi- 
ness of dealing, as banks of discount and deposit, 
with the money created and issued direct from the 
I] nited States Treasury. 



25 



INTRINSIC VALUE. 

The dogma that Intrinsic Yalue exists in the so- 
called " precious metals," gold and silver, has exerted 
more influence in creating social enslavement of man- 
kind than the exploded and equally absurd dogma of 
the "divinity of kings." 

Anything dependent cannot have intrinsic value, 
for the word "intrinsic" implies something beyond 
and above all extraneous influences, and as gold and 
silver would forever remain embedded in the earth 
without man's manipulation, their value is as entirely 
dependent upon the fiat of authorized power of civil 
government as is the value of the commonest clay. 

Brute force can be appreciated and be resisted by 
brute force, but the syllogisms of error can be so dis- 
guised by sophistry that the victims unconsciously 
become their own task-masters by hugging the chain 
that enslaves them. This is especially applicable to 
the conferring upon gold and silver the false attribute 
of being the standard of payment or debt-balancing 
agent. 

The most potent tyrant in social life is debt, and 
when men bind themselves to pay what they can- 
not produce, or that their ability to purchase with 
their labor depends upon accidental sources — as the 
opening of metallic mines — they place around their 



26 INTRINSIC VALUE. 

necks a metallic chain fully as enslaving, though not 
so conspicuous, as the iron band around the neck of 
Gurth which proclaimed him the born thrall of Cedric 
the Saxon. 

After we Americans had made our political sepa- 
ration from that harlot of a mother, England, we 
bound ourselves to her in social slavery by swallowing 
in one gulp her common law, which is based upon 
intrinsic value in property, and claims to carry with 
it the right of governing those who had been robbed 
of their property. Land monopoly had divided the 
people into a small-creditor and a large-debtor class ; 
and to prevent the debtor class escaping from debt- 
slavery, the common law of England made all debts 
payable in metallic money, which the peasant could 
not produce any more than he could create land. 
Under this metallic restriction land monopoly has 
increased, and the peasant is as enslaved as when the 
monks and barons held him in military subjection. 
It is to the adoption of this common law of England • 
that the metallic standard of the United States owes 
its pretended legality, and not to any direct authority 
in the Constitution. 

Land was too abundant in the United States to 
admit of a land monopoly as in England, but the 
metallic standard system has covered more than three- 
fifths of all of our occupied land with interest-bearing 
mortgages, which are rapidly accumulating landed 
property in the hands of a few as in England. 

To maintain a certain amount of gold in the vaults 
of the Bank of England the people are driven to 
starvation and rioting ; and the effort to hoard a stipu- 



INTRINSIC VALUE. 27 

lated amount of gold in our national treasury is doing 
for Americans what the Bank of England is doing 
for Englishmen. The similarity of social conditions in 
the United States and in England point to a common 
cause — the inability of the debtor class to escape the 
burden of interest-bearing debts — and will continue 
as long as the debt-paying power is denied to produc- 
tions of industry. 

The iniquity of metallic intrinsic value was bad 
enough when it included both gold and silver, but 
when silver is denied its former privilege as a debt- 
payer, the chain of debt enslavement is doubled in 
power. It is in perfect accord with England's policy 
to enchain her subjects by every means she can 
invent; therefore the mono-metallic agent of pay- 
ment is natural for monarchical England, but unnatu- 
ral for adoption in democratic United States. 

The creditor class of the United States is mainly 
represented by the national banks, and, as evidence 
of their unscrupulous efforts to enhance their power 
over their debtors, we quote an edict issued by a 
bankers' convention held a few years since at Sara- 
toga, IST. Y. : — 

" The farmer is not rich according to the number of 
bushels of grain he raises^ nor is the iron manufacturer 
rich according to the number of jpounds of iron he makes ; 
but both are rich according to the amount of gold these 
articles will bring.''"' 

The eminent respectability of so august an assem- 
bly as a bankers' convention was deemed sufficient 
authority to give validity to any edict it might pro- 
mulgate, as not a particle of evidence was ofiered to 



28 INTRINSIC VALUE. 

sustain it. Kor can any evidence be offered for such, 
an asinine outrage upon the rights of the debt-paying, 
productive classes. Stupid and false as this edict of 
the bankers' convention is, it has nevertheless been the 
guiding principle of our national financial legislation 
since 1865 down to the present time, the two leading 
political parties rivalling each other in their worship 
of bank-power and the establishing of the gold 
tyranny. 

According to this gold theory not one of the great 
non-producing gold States has a dollar's worth of value 
tintil some gold pedler comes along and dictates prices 
for all productions. There is not a certainty that 
such a pedler will ever come along, nor do the 
banks promise he will ever come. The banks do not 
want the gold pedler to come along, because, in his 
absence, the necessity of the people will compel them 
to buy bank credit as a balancing agent between in- 
dividual debtors and creditors. The banks claim 
their debt is honest money ^ always the equivalent of 
any standard of payment, and as long as they are the 
people's creditors they can maintain their position. 
But in doing this, the banks lend a club to break their 
own heads. Educating the people to nse credit as a 
substitute for an absurd arbitrary standard of metal, 
the people will naturally inquire if they cannot create 
their own credit upon some permanent data that will 
avoid the arbitrary fluctuations in the volume of bank 
credit, and at the same time be cheaper as well as 
more reliable. 

Taking the bankers' assertion that everything is to 
be estimated by its ability to be exchanged for gold, 



INTRINSIC VALUE. 29 

we find that from 1861 to 1879 bank debt was not 
even claimed to be convertible into gold, yet the 
banks sold billions upon billions of their debt to the 
people and received many millions of dollars as in- 
terest. Tested by the edict of their own convention, 
all the sales of their debts during that period were 
barefaced swindles ; selling a worthless article to an 
ignorant and confiding public. The practical evi- 
dence that for eighteen years the people transacted 
business exchanges by use of an agent not laying the 
least claim to a gold value, should fully demonstrate 
to intelligent men that the bankers' convention, as 
well as the principle upon which our national finan- 
cial legislation is based, are frauds upon the people. 

There is a very valuable lesson to be learned from 
these eighteen years' experience of non- metallic money. 
Bank debt is based directly upon debt and only in- 
directly, by intervention of law, upon the property of 
the debtor, who may, before the maturity of his debt, 
place his property beyond reach and leave his debt 
out in the cold. There is, therefore, an uncertain 
amount of contingent loss in all bank assets. Indi- 
vidual business debts will average at least fifty per 
cent, of the market value of the merchandise held by 
the debtor, and as individual business debts form the 
greatest bulk of bank assets, it is very evident that 
bank assets do not offer anything like the same secur- 
ity for their debt, as assets based upon only one per 
cent, of the market value of property itself, regardless 
of ownership. 

The citizens of a republic have a right to pledge 
4 



30 INTRINSIC VALUE. 

their property for any purpose they may deem ad- 
vantageous to their welfare. The citizens of the 
United States taxed themselves to crush a rebellion, 
and they have an equal right to pledge their property 
as a substitute for bank debt to facilitate business 
development. 

The property of the citizens of the United States is 
not stored in public, but in private, individual store- 
houses, and it is to these individual establishments 
that public debt must go for redemption, the same as 
bank debt does. Behind all forms of debt is the re- 
deeming agent, not an inert material, but man with 
his productive industry, and when only one per cent, 
of individual property is required, is there not a 
greater certainty of payment than when fifty per 
cent, is demanded? 

One per cent, on the individual property would be 
a safficient assessment to begin the substitution of 
public for bank debt. Why not do it? 

Some writers have gone so far as to assert that the 
Author of the universe made gold and silver com- 
paratively scarce in order that they should be recog- 
nized and used as standards. This gross insult to the 
world's Creator needs not a comment. It is too dis- 
gusting for discussion." 

Yalue being entirely ideal there cannot be a stand- 
ard of value, though law can and does create standards 
of payment, i. e., legal tenders. 



31 



BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAH. 

To do this profitably requires a true conception of 
what is cheap. Misconception of the truth, especially 
when confounding it with low prices, has sent indivi- 
duals and nations into bankruptcy when they fondly 
thought they were on the road to fortune. 

Cheap is a comparative term dependent for solution 
on the equitable relation between the productive and 
the purchasing power of the members of a community. 
Low prices are the futile attempts of manufacturers 
to adjust sales to an inadequate purchasing ability in 
the members of a community. Experience teaches us 
that when the purchasing power of a people is de- 
veloped, as it was in 1865, sales of merchandise at 
apparently high prices prove their cheapness by the 
large demand made for them by consumers able and 
anxious to consume all they could get ; and experi- 
ence also teaches us that when the purchasing ability 
is stinted, by any cause whatever, stocks of unsold 
merchandise accumulate even when offered at great 
decline in selling prices. 

Purchasing ability being the pivotal point on which 
values of merchandise depend, it is of primary im- 
portance to determine the best way to give individuals 
their highest purchasing power. 

As production and service pay for production and 



32 BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAK. 

service, it is self-evident that the more intimate and 
direct the exchanging parties come in contact the 
cheaper and more rapid will the exchanges be made. 
They then mutually buy at the cheapest and sell at the 
highest value. This apparent paradox is readily ex- 
plained by the fact that crude articles, the first efforts 
of individual labor, reach their culminated value at the 
door of the mill for conversion into form for human 
use, while the finished article is then and there at its 
cheapest value. Wheat, cotton, logs, ores, etc., have 
their highest value at the grist, spinning, and saw 
mills, and the furnace; and flour, muslin, lumber, etc., 
are the cheapest at the same establishments. As the 
serviceable value of articles are not in themselves 
enhanced by transportation, the closer the convert- 
ing agent is to the source of supply the more profit- 
able it is for both producer and consumer. It is 
practically impossible to avoid some transportation 
from crude to finished productions and back again to 
the original source of supply, and as the producer of 
crude materials has to pay the transport cost both 
ways, it is his interest to have this cost at its minimum. 
When the farmer can reach the grist mill with his 
own team he knows exactly what it costs to and from 
the mill, but when cars and steamboats go and come 
between the farm and mill he is largely in their 
power. 

When the finished article comes in competition 
with similar articles made from other sources of sup- 
ply, the selling price of the finished article regulates 
the price of the crude article at home. It is therefore 
of the highest importance to all producers of crude 



BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAR. 33 

materials, as farmers, miners, etc., to have the con- 
sumers of flour, cloth, and iron, etc., as much removed 
from competition from other sources as possible. 
There is not a branch of productive industry in the 
United States so dependent upon protection against 
foreign competition as the American farmer, yet 
stupidly blind to his own interest, he allows himself 
to be duped by such college quacks as Perry, and 
Sumner, and some smaller chips from the same block, 
and by such miserable demagogues as Beecher, 
Hewitt, Carlisle, Hewitt, etc., and is clamoring to 
have all restrictions taken from English goods under 
the gross delusion that England will buy our crude 
material to the extent that we buy her manufactures, 
when she has no more idea of doing so than she has 
of doing any decent act towards humanity. 

Let us examine into the advantages so loudly 
claimed by its advocates. In the first place, by an 
infernal system of fraud and violence, England obtained 
possession of the valleys of the Ganges and of the 
Kile, and by merciless taxation upon the defenceless 
natives, she is annually increasing her supplies of 
wheat and cotton from those regions, and in the near 
future will be independent of any supply from this 
country unless below the price of Indian slave labor. 
Spending millions of money every year in facilitating 
transportation she has succeeded in reducing the 
price of India wheat so low, that but for the tariff* 
duty on wheat, the American Atlantic seaports would 
be shut out from our own farmers. With our own 
home market only saved to the farmer by a tax, 
what hope has he for the English market where there 



34 BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAK. 

is not such a tax, and to reach, which he has 3000 
miles ocean carriage to pay ? 

If when wheat is worth one dollar per bushel it 
requires 20 pounds of flour to pay the freight on a 
barrel of flour to England, and 20 more pounds of 
flour to pay freight on the cloth brought back, the 
purchasing power of the barrel of flour is 160 pounds. 
"When wheat is worth only 50 cents per bushel, the 
freight to and fro will be double, 80 pounds, making 
the purchasing ability of the barrel of flour only 120 
pounds. That is, the percentage cost of freight increases 
as the price of the article decreases^ which should con- 
vince any sane man of the folly of striving for a 
market wherein freight has such tyrannical power, 
until every avenue of the home market has been filled 
to the fullest capacity, which is not the case at pre- 
sent. In the English market the American farmer 
buys dear and sells cheap. 

In 1833, at the dictation of the Southern* slave- 
holders, we began the experiment of patronizing En- 
glish workshops as being cheaper than our own, with 
the result that every year the purchasing power of 
American products declined, culminating, in 1840, to 
such prostration of value that individual, and, conse- 
quently, public purses were exhausted; and although 
we owed not one dollar of national debt we could not 
borrow the paltry sum of twenty millions of dollars; 
the cautious money lenders in Europe saw our selling 
so cheap and buying so dear would only increase the 
ne'cessity for new loans, as it had already created the 
necessity for the loan then requested. In 1842 we 
began the policy of patronizing our own shops, and 



BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAR. 85 

directly our purchasing ability began to advance, and 
in a short time the duties on imported goods filled 
the public treasury to overflowing, and private purses 
were enabled to buy comfortable homes. Official 
reports show that the more positively we determine 
to make American production pay for American con- 
sumption the more anxious are foreign countries to 
sell us their higher grades of manufactures. In place 
of the clay-stuffed low-priced muslins they sent us in 
exchange for our low-priced crude materials, they sent 
us fine cambrics which our infantile establishments 
had not yet learned to make. With every improve- 
ment of American manufacture our paying ability to 
purchase foreign luxuries increases. Let those who 
doubt this statement examine for themselves the ex- 
port and import reports of the years when we patron- 
ized foreign shops in preference to our own, most 
absurdly called Free Trade, and when we reversed 
this policy in 1842 and 1861 known as "Protective" 
years. 

The American miller being excluded from foreign 
supply of wheat has to pay American prices for wheat, 
provided he has customers sufficient to buy all the 
American production in the shape of flour. When 
stocks of flour accumulate in the grist mills the miller 
can dictate prices to the farmer, it is therefore the 
joint interest of the farmer and miller to secure cus- 
tomers for their products. The converter of every 
form of crude material to finished production has to 
be fed wherever he may live, and it is, therefore, evi- 
dently the interest of American farmers to have opera- 
tives who cannot be fed by low-priced wheat raised by 



36 BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAR. 

Indian slave labor. By stimulating every possible 
form of productive industry in tbe United States, and 
our natural advantages make these almost infinite, the 
farmer creates the greate'st possible demand for his 
wheat. But when the American farmer advocates 
that every form of American mechanical or manufac- 
turing industry shall be regulated by English prices 
of goods made by men fed with cheap Indian wheat, 
he cannot expect that American labor can pay him 
higher prices for his farm produce than the English 
operative pays for India wheat. 

In the positive certainty in the very near future of 
our crude products being excluded from foreign mar- 
kets, every form of productive industry should be on 
the alert to increase the purchasing ability of the 
American people, for they have not any other avenue 
of egress for their productions. With the exclusion 
of the foreign market our railroads will lose a large 
business now in vogue in carrying grain from the 
Mississippi Yalley to the Atlantic Coast for shipment 
abroad, which must cease unless they exert their iif- 
fluence, by protection to American industry, to give 
employment to the thousands in our seaboard who 
are either idle or miserably underpaid, and who would 
gladly consume more of American food than we have 
been sending abroad. In fact it is impossible to say 
who is not directly interested in having his neighbor 
able to buy from him. The shoemaker knows his 
neighbor would gladly pay him for shoes for his bare- 
footed children if he had the means. Is not only he, 
but the tailor, hatter, etc., all equally interested in 
giving purchasing ability to their neighbors, not by 



BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAR. 37 

individual charity or eftbrt, but by concentrated poli- 
tical action compelling national protection against 
English invasion upon American industry. This 
form of invasion is a thousandfold more destructive 
to American independence than any military inva- 
sion, for fear of which it is proposed to spend millions 
of the people's money. Monarchies govern by force, 
republics by intelligence and equity. 

England is a warning example against the substitu- 
tion of low prices for true cheapness. In her attempts 
to force sales of merchandise at arbitrary low prices 
she has crushed the purchasing power of her own 
people until they are driven to starvation point and 
present themselves in masses before the Parliament 
house as proof of their misery. The Cobden Club is 
doing for England what the wars and court extrava- 
gances of Louis XlVth did for France, planting the 
seed for a social and political revolution, the conse- 
quences of which it is impossible to foretell. The 
mob of to-day may, and probably will, organize into 
an army in the near future, and organization for right 
is bound to conquer organization for wrong. 

England has disbursed millions of money in outra- 
geous wars upon weakly defensive nations to crush 
the purchasing power of the people. In India and 
Egypt the people starve because they cannot aftbrd 
to consume the food their industry has raised, and see 
it carried off' to England, where the poor English serf 
is equally unable to consume it. English politicians, 
including the Cobden Club, call this food cheap; it is 
low-priced, but how cursedly dear in the scale of 
humanity. 



38 



SUBSIDIES. 

There is a strange hallucination with many of our 
leading citizens that money received for productions 
sold to a neighbor is not as good as the money re- 
ceived from a foreigner for the same articles. That 
is to say, if the land west of the Mississippi still re- 
mained under the Spanish flag, the present business 
done with that section of country would be considered 
as a great increase of national wealth and commerce, 
but as the people there are under the American flag, 
and the merchandise is carried to them in railroad 
cars instead of ships, this great business is counted 
for nothing, stigmatized as mere home trade un- 
worthy of the name of commerce. 

There is also a great howl that the American flag 
does not float at the mast-head of steamships sailing 
to Europe, South America, etc. These howlers 
ignore our great sea-coast traific from the St. Law- 
rence to the Gulf of Mexico carried on under the 
American flag and far exceeding the transatlantic 
trade. Steamers, schooners, sloops, and barges effect 
an enormous amount of exchanges, while the daily 
traffic of a trunk line railway could not be loaded in 
a foreign steamer under a month. 

The nonsense of this mania can be well illustrated 
in the case of the steamer Tagus, that came to this 



SUBSIDIES. 39 

port a few years since as a pioneer movement of open- 
ing steam communication between Philadelphia and 
Liverpool. There was great praise at the time given 
in the newspapers for the spirited manner in which 
our merchants at the Corn Exchange bought 60,000 
bushels of grain to insure a return cargo to the 
steamer. 

At that time information was obtained from a relia- 
ble importer of European cloths that 60 pounds of 
cloth of the average quality and price were worth 
$160, while 60 pounds of wheat were sent for one 
dollar, leaving us in debt $149 for every 60 pounds 
of imported cloth. If we take the average price of 
the import cargo at only $5 for each. 60 pounds in 
60,000 bushels of wheat, we have a — 

Total of . . . ... $300,000 

For which we sent . . . 60,000 



Leaving us in debt . . . $240,000 

If we assume, for sake of illustration, that the 
steamer's expenses were $3000 each way, the per- 
centage of freight would be one per cent, on the im- 
port and five per cent, on our export cargo, a rate 
that no low priced article can pay, and at once ex- 
cludes American shipping. 

American exports being lower in price in propor- 
tion to bulk than imports, anything like a balance of 
accounts cannot be maintained unless some of the 
foreign vessels come over in ballast, or American 
vessels carrying American productions must return 
in ballast. Debt cannot be increased without limit. 



-iO SUBSIDIES. 

When we can put $150 value in 60 pound weight and 
can find customers we can have steamships for trans- 
atlantic, as we now have for coastwise traffic at Amer- 
ican prices and among our own citizens. 

American steamship owners go whining and blub- 
bering before Congress and the public that even if the 
steamships were presented to them they could not 
run them. Ex-Governor Hoyt made such a state- 
ment in the Academy of Music when lecturing on 
Free Trade, but the audience didn't scare worth one 
cent. In fact every thinking man knows that if a 
foreign vessel never entered an American port we 
would be much better off. 

The idea that toting goods to and fro within the 
same zone adds to the wealth of either party may do 
for a simple minded priest like Fenelon to teach a 
verdant youth like Tel^maque, but the fact that such 
trade cannot be maintained without subsidies or 
sacrifices proves the error of such doctrine. Espe- 
cially is this true as regards articles of food, the great 
staple of American exports. Every land can feed its 
own population, and England is not an exception, but 
being anxious to starve out her agricultural laborers, 
especially the Irish, she is steadily decreasing her 
area of arable land, with proportionate decrease in. 
her home supply of food. England has created a 
great rivalry among other nations to supply her with 
food, which she consequently is getting at bottom 
prices. She knows that every pound of food im- 
ported into England helps to dig an Irishman's grave, 
and these graves she intends to dig until the last 
Irishman is either dead or expatriated. 



SUBSIDIES. 41 

England subsidizes nearly all, if not entirely all, of 
her first-class steamers, and with such subsidies buvs 
the right to divert them to her own use ; to make 
them war transports at a moment's notice, without the 
slightest regard to mercantile demands. This subsidy 
maintains a navy much cheaper than by keeping 
government vessels in commission. 

As our government is not run upon piratical prin- 
ciples like England, her subsidy policy is no model 
for us. 

True commerce is between different zones with 
variety of productions that can be exchanged with 
mutual advantage. We have between our own 
national limits the ability to produce almost every 
article pertaining to human luxury. Why not de- 
velop a true commerce across the zones on American 
soil, where American production paying for Amer- 
ican production keeps us out of debt to foreigners? 

Claimants for subsidies to maintain a mercantile 
navy for foreign trade point to the fact of our land 
subsidies to internal railroads. Whether these land 
grants were wisely or foolishly done, the effect has 
been to develop the power of association within our 
own jurisdiction and tend to a concentration of politi- 
cal power backed by intelligent freemen, whose moral 
strength will crush the pigmy hireling armies of 
monarchical Europe. The profits of the foreign carry- 
ing trade are presented to show what we lose in not 
having a foreign mercantile navy. Do they ever try 
to show the profits of the home carrying trade? Does 
the balance-sheet of England's commerce show that 
her people are getting richer and happier by her " 
6 



4:2 SUBSIDIES. 

carrying trade? We cannot follow her example 
without earning the same reward. 

There is a clause in the revised statutes of the 
United States providing for ten per cent, differential 
duties on imports in American bottoms, which clause 
has been abrogated in our treaties with foreign 
nations, and now we are asked to put our hands in 
our pockets and pay subsidy to vessels to bring us in 
debt. Abrogate the treaties and enforce the ten per 
cent, act, and whatever commerce other nations mayB 
want to do with us will be done in American ships,, 
provided we keep up our duties to a protective point jf 

There is much stress laid upon the value of the' 
South American markets, but for what reason it is 
hard to imagine. An ignorant, priest-ridden people 
living in a climate requiring a limited supply of cloth- 
ing, with an almost spontaneous supply of food, few 
diversified forms of manufacture, and they of the 
most common order, what have they got to pay us 
for what we send to them? § 

Every South American government is in financial 
difficulties, a sure indicator of individual poverty. 
And the Buenos Ayres papers' reports of the trade 
with England fully prove South American poverty. 
They lately said that imports from England amounted 
to twenty-eight millions and the exports were only 
ten millions, causing a drain of eighteen millions of 
gold, forcing the banks to suspend coin payments with 
utter prostration of business. A situation resembling 
our own in 1837 from our attempting to find foreign 
markets for American industry by importing English 
manufactures. 



SUBSIDIES. 43 

Commerce cannot be done so cheaply, nor so equi- 
tably with foreigners as among ourselves, and until 
our home channels are filled, it is positive stupidity to 
exchange the cheap and certain for the expensive and 
uncertain. We have in our midst a large population 
now stinted in their purchasing ability, which, if pro- 
perly developed, is worth more than any foreign 
market can ever be. 

England has expended millions of money to open 
commerce with Turkey and Egypt. What is the 
value of English trade with those countries now? If 
England had spent ten per cent, in wages to her own 
'operatives that she spent in piracy upon compara- 
tivelv defenceless nations, her manufactures and her 
people would not be in the wretched condition they 
are to-day. With an equitable system of wages to 
our own.great body of consumers our home market 
Iwould always be in demand equal to the supply. 

If foreigners want our goods let them come after 
them and pay us our price, but when we have to 
solicit new markets for sales of our goods the sacrifice 
is on our side. If we wish to compete with England 
in other markets we must sell on long credits, for that 
is her policy in selling, and collect the bills by an 
army. Shall we imitate her brutal policy? 

If we wish to extend custom for our manufactures, 
let us take a hint from the large retail stores. They 
will send even a trifling purchase several miles dis- 
tant from the store and not make a difference in 
charge if the customer takes it with him. The de- 
livery is charged in the general expense account and 
not specific upon the article. Now, as every dollar of 



44 SUBSIDIES. 

new trade brought to Philadelphia ramifies its influ- 
ence through every individual channel of business, 
let every citizen give his equitable mite to a fund 
controlled by representatives of Philadelphia indus- 
try. "With this fund let the committee get one of 
Cramp's first-class steamers, and then announce to the 
Brazilians: — 

"Philadelphia manufactures delivered at R'o Janeiro 
at Philadelphia prices, and coffee to the full amount 
of purchases will be taken in payment." 

Coffee is sold in every grocery store in the United 
States. An announcement that "Brazilian coffee 
would be delivered at Brazilian prices" would make 
Pliiladelphia the cheapest market for coffee, and at- 
tract the attendance of new customers. This would 
be the true and cheapest form of a subsidy, but it 
will not be considered for an instant as long as Uncle 
Sam is willing to foot the bill. Of course other cities 
would follow this experiment if once adopted by 
Philadelphia, and the petty insignificance of the South 
American trade would soon show itself when di- 
vided up. 

Toting merchandise around the world does not im- 
prove its quality, but travel improves human intelli- 
gence. Passenger and not freight steamers are 
wanted, and these will be supplied when the demand 
comes, for personal comfort and safety will be paid for. 



45 



LAND. 

To the isolated man with nothing but his own in- 
adequate physical abilities, land is a most inexorable 
tyrant. It will not of its own free will give food or 
shelter, but, like all other tyrants, it will yield to 
well-devised organization. North American Indians, 
numbered only by thousands, led a half-starved pre- 
carious existence while they had possession of the 
virgin soil of the same domain that now supports 
millions, through the powers of association, in afflu- 
ence. The white man was not physically stronger 
than the Indian, but he brought with him the repre- 
sentatives of centuries of association in the axe, spade, 
and plow, with which to conquer the land, and the 
rifle to give him meat to support life while land took 
its own time to perfect the grain. In fact, a loaf of 
bread, the representative panacea for pauperism, is 
the product of a large investment of pre-existent 
capital which must be supplied to the pauper to en- 
able him to be self-supporting, even if he has the 
ability to become so with the aid of land and the pre- 
existent capital presented to him. Agriculture is not 
automatic to be used like a machine, but, even in its 
crudest forms, requires skill and experience not gene- 
rally possessed by handicraft workers. It is, there- 
fore, only adding insult to injury to tell skilled 



46 LAND. 

mechanics and artisans, thrown out of employment 
by quack financial legislation destroying the instru- 
ment of association, to " go West" without either capi- 
tal or experience. You might as well give a man a 
chunk of iron and tell him to convert it into watch 
springs, as to give him a plot of land and tell him to 
make a loaf of bread. Both watch springs and bread 
can be made by properly organized association of 
other industries, and it is this organized diversity of 
industries that gives value to all crude forms of 
nature's elements. Isolated cultivated land pays 
high interest to obtain command of the instrument of 
association, money, which it would not be required 
to do if value existed in the land itself, and was not 
dependent upon association. 

The plausible slang of sentimentalists (and engage 
of the Cobden Club), e. ^., Henry George, and the igno- 
rant ravings of socialistic would-be leaders, only mis- 
lead public attention from the true remedy against 
enforced idleness on some individuals, and other so- 
ciety evils, which all spring from defective associa- 
tive arrangements. 

Land is not the source of wealthy it is only the vehicle 
by use of which man develops a product existing in 
ideal form before putting a spade in the ground. 
Land is the connecting link between man's necessities 
and supply, as money is the connecting link between 
man and his fellow -men ; both land and money should 
be protected from centralized monopoly as existed 
when the monk and baron owned all the land. 

Land ownership is considered a strong element of 
conservatism ; that the homestead incites a spirit of 



LAND. 47 

self-respect which tends to moral strength and good 
citizenship. That this is partially trae cannot be 
denied, but land ownership is not so great a blessing 
as is claimed for it. 

Fixed land tenure has a strong tendency to convert 
conservatism into mud-turtleism ; to make the intro- 
duction of new ideas and new principles very repug- 
nant. If we examine the intellectual condition of 
provincial France, where the land division is more de- 
veloped than in any other country in Europe, we do 
not find an educated progressive population, nor one 
holding a higher moral standard than is to be found 
in other lands. How far the anti-progressive spirit of 
the Roman Catholic Church, so long dominant in 
France, together with the centralizing policy of French 
political rulers are responsible for this stagnated, 
mud-turtle condition, the reader must judge for him- 
self. 

From an official report of an elaborate investigation 
made under the joint efibrts of public and private ex- 
aminers, the physical condition of the French peasant 
is not one to be envied by the peasantry of other 
countries. This report shows that the combined 
efforts of parents and children in cultivating their 
little patches of ground by hand labor gave the family 
a precarious animal existence with little aspiration 
for intellectual improvement, and with as little oppor- 
tunity to gratify it. The consequence is that this 
waste of human energy makes even vegetable food 
very dear, while even a taste of animal food is a treat 
only for high days and holidays. Household furni- 
ture and Sunday clothing descend from generation to 



48 LAND. 

generation. Greater diversity of human employment 
with a concentration of little patches of ground into 
fields large enough to substitute the plow and reaper 
for the spade and sickle, would enrich the poor peas- 
ant with more and better food, also a better supply of 
furniture and clothing. 

Across the channel from France we come to the 
other extreme, a villainous centralization of land 
ownership into the hands of an unscrupulous oli- 
garchy intently devoted to destruction of food-pro- « 
ducing land, and converting it into mere pleasure 
grounds, so that no one shall exist there but house- 
servants, and mill operatives, and miners, to serve 
and produce wealth for the land owners. 

Land is yet too abundant to feel the restraint of 
monopoly in the United States, and the people are 
earnestly discussing the best means to prevent its 
being monopolized by corporations and aliens. A 
certain amount of land is necessary for the profitable 
use of machinery and cheapest production of food to 
avoid French errors, but beyond this amount indi- 
vidual possession should be strictly limited to avoid 
the curse of the English system. 

Combined action on the part of the wool grower, 
the cloth weaver, and the tailor, creates a coat which 
is bought and worn without any idea of tyranny on 
the part of the wearer against the tailor, who has paid 
the other two for their share in making the coat, but 
when some one else paj^s mechanics and others for a 
building which shelters both the man and his coat, 
then this house owner becomes an outrageous tyrant 
when he asks pay for the use of the house, in the 



opinion of some who may wish to occupy the house, 
although such person has not contributed one iota of 
his labor toward constructing the house. If these 
discontented anti-renters were asked to give the result 
of their labor for nothing they would bitterly com- 
plain of the injustice. It is not considered any injus- 
tice to pay for a house and get fee simple possession 
by a parchment deed, but to get actual possession for 
a specifi-ed period by paying a percentage on the 
amount demanded for a perpetual title of ownership, 
then this percentage is called robbery. 

All investments of money capital, sooner or later, 
sink to one common level of profit, and house rents, 
as a general rule, are rather below than above this 
level. The true cause of complaint is that the renter 
does not receive that just compensation for his ser- 
vices, which, if he did receive, would enable him to 
pay rent as cheerfully as he paid his tailor or shoe- 
maker. 

There are thousands of our citizens perfectly able 
to buy and own their homes, but they prefer not to 
permanently invest in bricks and mortar, preferring 
stipulated periods of ownership by payment of rent, 
so that they can vacate when improved and more con- 
venient houses are offered, or when business considera- 
tions may make a change of location desirable. Change 
of business channels sometimes leaves property so high 
and dry that it is more burdensome than profitable. 

Until we recognize that man is the only source of 
wealth, and that all atoms of nature, be they metallic 
or earthy, are dormant and valueless without the im- 



50 LAND. 

press of human intelligence, we will never be able to 
establish a true republic. 

Every scientific development, as electricity and 
telephony, giving man greater command over the 
forces of nature, opens new avenues for individual 
activity in higher forms of thought, which will assign 
all crude materials pertaining to the physical to their 
proper station as obedient accessories. 

Man was never created by a fiat nor as a •finality; 
he is the developed spirit of every atom of nature that 
preceded and now surrounds him, and this developed 
humanity is progressing as rapidly to-day as ever in 
the past, and will continue so in the future. With 
every onward step the grosser forms of nature sink 
in value, and land among the rest. 



51 



LABOR. 

Expressing Labor as any and every act useful to 
the community, be it mental or physical, it is impos- 
sible for legal authority to classify labor any more 
than it can classify citizens. Whatever may be the 
names by which citizens designate themselves for 
business convenience, they are all subordinate to the 
title or name of citizen. 

The instant that any form of labor is made a legal 
specialty the whole superstructure of republicanism is 
shattered. A citizen has not a right to demand any 
act for himself that he is not willing to grant to every 
one else under similar circumstances. Violation of 
this evident truth has brought a variety of paupers to 
the doors of legislative halls, asking alms in the way 
of special privileges for themselves. Bankers asking, 
and unfortunately obtaining, the privilege of convert- 
ing their investments in Uuited States bonds into a 
currency which is denied to other forms of invest- 
ment. Ship owners ask for subsidies to pay freights 
on vessels to lessen the cost of importation and be 
better able to compete in price with American in- 
dustry, under the disguise or deception that such sub- 
sidies would extend American commerce. 

Copying these iniquitous examples, American citi- 
zens engaged in physxal employments have organized 



52 LABOR. 

to demand special legislation for themselves as a class, 
thereby acknowledging the correctness of previous 
special legislation, which has hitherto been a constant 
theme of complaint in what are known as Labor Con- 
ventions. Law is dependent -apon the power behind 
it, and the moment that law is invoked for labor it is 
only a question of power whether the laws prevalent 
under Henry YIIL, of England, shall not be enacted 
again. If law had the power to limit a man to the 
condition in which he was born, as the Chinese law, 
then there would be some excuse for such action, but 
being free to develop his individual capacity to the 
best of his own judgment, the true policy of every one 
dependent upon his own physical exertions is to de- 
mand repeal of all present privileges, and the enact- 
ment of laws equally beneficial to each and every 
citizen. 

Suppose Federal authority could collate a perfectly 
true statement of every penny of wages paid to each 
man, woman, and ^ child in the United States, what 
suggestions for legislative action could be deduced 
from such a table ? Massachusetts has the reputation 
of making the most elaborate labor statistics, and has 
made some improvement in factory regulations which 
could have been as well done without the Labor Bu- 
reau as with.it. Some statements have been made 
showing how much, or rather how little, a family can 
subsist upon, just as an agricultural society would 
discuss the fattening of a pig. 

Some one will point to the benefits accruing from 
the Agricultural Bureau. What are they ? Can any 
valuable suggestions be deduced from columns of 



LABOR. 53 

figures giving the namber of bushels of cereals, etc., 
that were produced the previous year? Will such 
reports influence the weather ? Will they have any 
effect upon planting? 

What we really want is a Bureau of Information, 
where the relations between man and society can be 
investigated and the causes made known why at cer- 
tain periods industrial prosperity blooms over the 
land, with harmonious relations existing in work- 
shops and factories ; why, at other periods, idleness, 
poverty, crime, and discordant relations are rampant. 
This desirable information will never be obtained by 
legislative inquiry so long as legislation is based upon 
the English idea of man being a chattel. It is this 
chattel legislation against which Knights of Labor 
and Trades Unions are fighting, but for want of proper 
study of the subject, these organizations have never 
been able to effect permanent improvement. The 
panics of 1857 and 1873 are liable to occur again, as 
the same causes are as actively at work to-day as they 
were then. In 1857 and in 1873 labor organizations 
were thoroughly prostrated, and the members had the 
opportunity of learning that prosperous lahor could 
maintain labor organizations^ hut that lahor organiza- 
tions in themselves could not maintain prosperous in- 
dustry. The agent for good or evil is outside of 
their organization, but very few of the members take 
the trouble to find out where or who the agent is. 
In 1857 I had frequent opportunities of asking intel- 
ligent skilled American mechanics, if they and their 
bosses had any disputes. The answer uniformly was 
no ! That the boss would gladly give them work, 
6 



54 LABOK. 

and they would be glad to accept it. Then I asked, 
Have you attempted to ascertain the cause why 
American citizens anxious to be employed had to re- 
main idle? Invariably the answer was no! Some 
blamed one thing, and some another, but not one 
could give any good reason for his opinion. They 
repeated what they had heard others say. It is some- 
what better to-day wi^i some few, but not with the 
great body of employes. 

It does not appear to have entered into the heads 
of the railroad employes in the West to ask why a 
single individual, as Jay Gould, had so much power 
over them. He had not an army to back him, yet 
he could control their time and wages. The very 
fact that arbitration was demanded was an act of 
servitude that no American citizen should submit to, 
although arbitration might be available as a tempo- 
rary expedient for the time being, owing to previous 
negligence in not preventing Jay Grould, or any other 
man, from obtaining such power over them. Every 
one of the strikers, if he had had equal talents and 
opportunities, would have done just as Jay Gould has 
done, taking advantage of a false system of finan- 
cial legislation which enabled him to buy bankrupt 
railroads for comparatively nothing. Killing Jay 
Gould will not kill the system, nor will the change of 
ownership after his death change the situation one 
jot. Go to the ballot-box and boycott the Shermans, 
Morrills, Morrisons, Carlisles, Beechers, and college 
professors, the authors and advisers of the system 
that prevents each man from being the servant of his 



LABOK. 55 

own arbitration, and makes him dependent upon that 
of another. 

If citizens, calling themselves "labor men," would 
devote one-tenth part of the time to study of econo- 
mic laws as they do to bellowing in so-called " labor 
conventions," and make their convictions felt at the 
ballot-box, they would have small cause of complaint; 
but a constituency ignorant of economic laws will 
have representatives equally ignorant with unwhole- 
some results. It is very safe to say that not twenty 
men on the floor of Congress have ever read a work 
on the best means of enabling man to associate with 
his fellow-men, yet they draw salaries as if they were 
first-class workmen. A machine shop cannot be run 
with unskilled hands any more than a government 
can be run with an ignorant constituency. 

It is very common to speak of strife between labor 
and capital, but such talk is incorrect; there is no 
strife between labor and capital, the strife is between 
labor and gold money, or money pretended to be 
based upon gold. The proof of this is shown by the 
harmonious relations existing in 1864 and '5, when we 
had a labor money, not dependent upon gold, and 
before those traitors to American industry, McCulloch, 
Sherman k Co., began their warfare against labor 
money, by withdrawing it from circulation, so as to 
prevent it from demanding gold, and then calling such 
contraction a " Eesumption of Specie Payment." From 
the date of the enactment of the so-called Resumption 
Act, business troubles began, culminating in 1873 in 
the total prostration of labor. The coining of silver 
with issue of silver certificates in 1878, gave labor a 



56 . LABOR. 

start again, and it was improving rapidly when Sena- 
tor Morrill and Eepresentative Wm. D. Kelley gave 
it a stunning blow on Marcli 3, 1883, by giving English 
manufactures increased ability to compete with Amer- 
ican labor by reducing duties on imports. 

Eestore the condition of the currency to what it was 
in 1864 and '5, and tariff duties to what they were prior 
to 1883, and Jay Gould would not be of any more ac- 
count than any other citizen, and the railroad com- 
panies would be offering acceptable terms to the very 
men who are now vainly endeavoring to secure even 
a pittance. Election of Congressmen pledged to restore 
the currency and the tariff to their former status, is 
the only possible means to place labor in an indepen- 
dent position. This coming autumn is the time for 
action, but it must be commenced at once, so as to be 
ready to strike in October at the ballot-box. 

There is not any use for universal suffrage if it is 
not applied to useful purposes. What other motive 
than security for social happiness can men have for 
going to the polls ? 

Mr. Powderly makes a fatal error in advising non- 
political action. All the labor troubles of the day are 
effects of neglected political duties, and the sooner the 
error is retrieved the sooner will come the remedy. 

A great error is made by many who have become 
skilled in some branch of mechanics, in believing that 
their skill is a finality to remain in the same condition 
during their lifetime, though they see around them 
continued advancement in all other branches. The 
world is ever on the alert for new ideas, and he who 
gives them wins, while the others remain to be 



LABOK. ^7 

"hewers of wood and drawers of water." No man. 



whatever be his occupation, should ever consider him- 
self out of his apprenticeship. Technical education is 
of immense importance towards developing new ideas, 
provided the students will consider every new fact 
the same as they would a new and improved tool, as 
an instrument for still better work. 



6* 



58 



WAGES. 

Every act useful in a community is justly entitled 
to compensation, whether it be the act of an author, 
artist, manufacturer, distributor, or of manual labor. 
This compensation we designate as wages, and as it 
is through disbursement of wages that every dollar 
of money finds its way into circulation, the import- 
ance of a proper understanding of this subject cannot 
be overestimated. 

The value of services are not only measured by the 
community in which they are performed, but the pay- 
ment is also made by the community, because, behind 
the metallic or paper certificate given in acknowledg- 
ment of a service rendered, stands the ability to give 
value in some form of productive industry for the 
certificate. It is evident then that the demand for 
productions and services increases with every in- 
crease of wage certificates, and also that the demand 
slackens with decrease of such certificates. The cer- 
tificates or money do not pay anything of themselves. 

Much time and space have been devoted to com- 
parison of wages as expressed by money, but all such 
discussions are mere windmill fightings. What other 
nations disburse as wasres is no criterion for an Ame- 
rican standard of wages. We want men, and not 
mere human machines, and we must have them, or 
else abandon the universal franchise. 



WAGES. 69 

The right of voting implies the duty of thinking, 
to do which a man must have healthy, physical, and 
mental conditions. Men and their families must be 
able to procure wholesome food and eat it in well- 
ventilated domicils; not to be given as charity, but 
as just compensation for their services. Unwholesome 
food and illy-ventilated houses disarrange brain and 
stomach, and create that unnatural desire for alcoholic 
•or other stimulant, which brings the " sample room" 
and " beer saloon," with entrances for " ladies," into 
existence. Demand always comes before supply, and 
it is the desire for rum that opens the saloon, and 
the best patrons of them are the lowest priced wage 
workers. This can be readily accounted for. Every 
human being has an intuitive desire for social enjoy- 
ment and amusement to relieve the drudgery of daily 
toil. The low-priced wage worker is unable to gratify 
any refined aspiration by hearing good elocution or 
good music, but must seek such as his few pennies 
will buy, and rum offers the most enticing reward. 
The best saint on earth cannot resist the desire of 
stimulant, if he is forced to physical exhaustion day 
after day, with no prospect of relief except by a ride 
in the coach that does not bring passengers back, and 
if these miserable quacks, who go snivelling around 
with debauched informers to find some poorly paid 
and over-worked human being who had bought a 
glass of beer on a Sunday, would study into cause 
and effect, and if they were really honestly in earnest 
(which is very doubtful), they would find out that 
well-earned homes and leisure to enjoy them are 
the best antagonists of rum mills. Such homes and 



60 WAGES. 

leisure must be provided, sooner or later, and the 
sooner we begin, the sooner will we begin to get rid 
of almshouses and prisons. 

Official records show that in periods of compara- 
tively well paid wages, the criminal record is the 
shortest, and the prisons most untenanted. This is 
in accordance with natural law. Man is the apex of 
all of Nature's mutations of this earth from chaos to 
the present condition, and with every advancement his 
aspirations expand. If these aspirations are checked 
by too severe a struggle for physical existence, he 
retrogrades towards the animal; but if he is sur- 
rounded by proper conditions, he advances towards 
the spiritual, and away from the animal. 

But independent of the rum question, low wages 
are a curse to the whole community. Low-priced 
wages necessitates too close quarters for living, which, 
in connection with poor food, generate disease whose 
germs find their way into the homes of the more for- 
tunate, where every sanitary precaution is observed, 
except that of keeping healthy the home of his less 
fortunate neighbor. 

Many employers decrease their wages on the false 
assumption that such reduction is added to the profit, 
but those who study this subject find that sales not 
only decline in price, but also in bulk with every re- 
duction of wages, and with a steady course towards 
closed mills and bankruptcy. The percentage cost of 
selling and distributing manufactures increases with 
the decline of sales, which more than balances the 
reduction in wages. 

Every manufacturer is himself a wage worker with 



WAGES. 61 

the public as liis paymaster, and as the operatives in 
his own establishment are typical of the community, 
he cannot fail to see that their ability to purchase is 
curtailed by the reduction of wages, which mast run 
its course through all other business establishments. 
In fact, reduction of wages is similar in effect to bank 
contractions of discounts. 

Muscular energy is one of the most perishable arti- 
cles owned by man. A day once wasted can never 
be recovered. It requires double pay for a working 
day to pay for the idle day, which men should well 
consider before they enforce weeks of idleness upon 
themselves for a paltry advance of ten or twenty per 
cent, in their wages, and which may last only for a 
short time. 

There are some inconsiderate people, arguing from 
assumptions and not from facts, who contend that 
the rate of wages has not any influence upon the 
welfare of the manual laborer. They say that high 
vv^ages cause a corresponding advance in the price of 
articles consumed, and that the month's wages will 
not buy more comforts than when wages were lower. 
The fallacy of this absurd assertion is manifest when 
we consider that the cost of the plant — building and 
machinery — and also the charge for interest, remain 
the same under high as under low wages. In addi- 
tion to these items there is the fact of the difference 
in the percentage of cost upon goods manufactured 
by the machinery running full time (always the case 
under high wages) than when the same machinery 
runs only part time. The percentage cost of distri- 
bution of the goods also declines under large sales, for 



62 WAGES. 

a clerk can make an invoice and bill of lading just as 
readily for two cases as he can for one. Witli large 
sales the manufacturer makes a larger amount of 
money, with less percentage of profit, than he does 
with slow sales and a higher percentage of nominal 
profit. High wages bring more money into circula- 
tion with a corresponding increase of cash business 
and diminution of individual credit — that great draw- 
back upon prosperous business. 

In 1864, before Hugh McCulloch began his infernal 
contraction of the currency, individual business notes 
were very rare, as there was plenty of money (good, 
honest Grreenbacks), and business transactions were 
cash. Comparatively high wages prevailed, and em- 
ployers and employed were as polite and complacent 
with each other as bride and groom. 

When the Boys in Blue had saved the country and 
were returning to their workshops, which they had 
left at their country's call, there was just as much 
need for money to pay these men in their workshops 
as it was to pay them on the battle-field. But before 
they had fairly rested, the order came from the 
National Treasury, " Make tramps of these soldiers; 
they crushed black slavery, and established freedom. 
I will make both whites and blacks slaves by with- 
drawing their means of earning a livelihood." These 
were not the words, but they express the sentiments 
of those who controlled the financial legislation when 
they funded current securities used as a circulating 
medium, and began withdrawing the Greenback. What 
are the strikes to-day, but embryo revolutions against 
metallic money slavery ! The aim of the strikers is 



WAGES. 63 

in every way commendable, but their plan of warfare 
is not well chosen. It is only through the ballot-box 
that wrongs can be corrected. 

There are some manufactures in our midst so closely 
pressed by English low-priced wage- made goods 
(thanks to Morrison, Morrill, and Kelley), that they 
cannot exist except by close approximation to English 
wages. The only advantageous strike the men in 
such establishments can make is against the Tariff 
Act of March 3, 1883, which laid the foundation of our 
business troubles. 

But, again, there are other investments entirely in- 
dependent of English competition, whose plants are 
several times more valuable than their original cost, 
and daily increasing in value by growth of popula- 
tion, who have not the slightest excuse for their 
brutal enslavement of their employes. When the 
chartered privileges of our street railways are taken 
in account current with the accommodations offered, 
we cannot shut our eyes to the great swindle they 
have perpetrated upon the public, and, when in addi- 
tion to this, they treat the unfortunate human beings, 
whom circumstances have compelled being their em- 
ployes, with a cruelty unequalled in the days of Uncle 
Tom, not only the employes, but the entire public 
should rise en masse and annul the contract so shame- 
fully violated. There is not a shadow of excuse for 
these companies making men work twelve hours a 
day for two dollars, and liable to discharge at a mo- 
ment's notice without cause or appeal. 

It is only through a positive system of high wages, 
guarantied beyond change, that shorter hours for 



64 WAGES. 

labor can be attained. The great body of the manual 
laborers are just abore the poverty line, their homes 
are devoid of refined comforts to which they all aspire, 
and for which they will work as long as their strength 
will permit, regardless of hours. The constant arrival 
of immigrants whose worldly possessions are very 
limited will resist all attempts to limit their working 
hours until they have secured home comforts. 

Neither competent wages nor shorter hours for 
work, with educational refinement, can ever be attained 
without complete exclusion of English degraded labor 
competition, and a full supply of money based upon 
productive labor issued directly by Congress. 



65 



THE SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS OF A 
PEOPLE MUST HARMONIZE WITH 
THEIR POLITICAL PRINCIPLES. 

For want of attention to this important truth the 
American people find their ideal republic so closely 
resembles monarchical countries in regard to individ- 
ual conditions, that it is very difficult to tell wherein 
the two systems differ, except in names of public 
authorities. The antagonism between individual in- 
terests is as strongly marked in the United States as in 
England, Germany, Belgium, and other monarchical 
countries in Europe. Class divisions of society regu- 
lated by money are as strongly defined in the United 
States as the titled distinctions are in Europe. 

Is it not time to correct this evil? 

The real, vital difference between monarchical and 
republican institutions consists in the social arrange- 
ments much more than in any political dicta. An 
Englishman can growl at his Queen and criticize the 
action of his Parliament with as much freedom as an 
American can criticize his President and Congress, 
and public sentiment in England can influence legisla- 
tion there with as much force as it can in the United 
States, though not quite so quickly. With a limited 
franchise an Englishman has as much political power 
as an American has with universal suffrage. It is 
7 



66 SOCIAL AKRANGEMEN^TS. 

very evident, therefore, that it is in the social 
arrangements where the oppressive power is hidden 
and not in the political. 

When our ancestors abolished primogeniture in 
regard to kings and property, and gave every man 
a voice in the management of public affairs, they 
yery naturally concluded that every bar to human 
prosperity and happiness had been removed. Peace 
had scarcely been concluded between England and 
America, before the crushing eflect of England's 
social system became so manifest in the United States 
that the six vears following — 1783 to 1789 — are re- 
corded as one of the most distressful periods of 
American history. It was to avert the curse of the 
English system that called the new, our present. Con- 
stitution into existence. Every time we change the 
policy adopted by our ancestors in 1789 we suffer the 
evils endured during the previous six years-. In 
spite of this historical evidence there are persistent 
fools in and out of Congress clamoring to reinstate 
the sufferings of past periods. 

Why should the social arrangements of a republic 
differ from those of a monarchy? Simply because 
different conditions of society are demanded. 

A monarchy can only be maintained by disintegra- 
tion of the people, having several grades or classes 
competing with each other, and a small favored class, 
closely allied to and supporting the throne. Disinte- 
gration is not enforced by military power, but by por- 
tioning to each class a share of the annual productive 
earnings in such a manner that the aristocratic 
governing class shall revel in luxury, while the ob- 



SOCIAL AERANGEMENTS. 67 

jective class are at the starvation level, or barely 
above it. By the annual productive earnings it is 
not intended to express the amount brought yearly 
into the royal treasury, but the actual amount of 
food and maoufactures produced by individual indus- 
try. The increased value given by manual labor to 
crude material converted into finished merchandise 
is so frittered away by interest and taxes, that only a 
pittance is left for the worker. So limited is his 
purchasing ability that in the cloth manufacturing dis- 
tricts — where Morrison, Carlisle, Beecher, etc., say 
cloths are so cheap — the poor weaver lives in rags. 
This condition cannot be otherwise where ten per 
cent, of the population get 85 per cent, of the annual 
earnings, and 90 per cent, of the population get 15 
per cent, of the annual earnings. 

What are the social arrangements whereby this 85 
and 15 per cent, division is made? 

In the first place, England prevents association 
among the subjective class by keeping the instru- 
ment of association, money, beyond their reach. Not 
having paper-money of less denomination than twenty- 
five dollars (five pounds sterling), all individual ex- 
changes must be made by metallic money (of which 
the entire kingdom cannot produce a single ounce), 
and consequently are limited to the supply of metallic 
money received from abroad for property in the form 
of merchandise sent out of the country. Property 
owners, whether of land, machinery, or manufactures, 
have, therefore, the entire control of the distribution 
of money among the landless producers of mer- 
chandise wealth ; and, as the more degraded and igno- 



68 SOCIAL AERANGEMENTS. 

rant these unfortunate victims can be kept the 
more contented they will be, it is the interest of 
the property owners to limit the supply of money to 
the minimum point. We had a similar state of 
affairs in the old slave States of the South. The 
slave owners controlled all Southern products, and it 
was through them that dribs of money found entrance 
into the pockets of the poor white men, who worked 
little patches of ground, and were unable to send their 
little bundle of cotton to the North. Abolitionists 
wondered how it was that a small percentage of the 
Southern population, as the slave owners were, could 
hold the whole mass of white men in such terror. 
"Cotton was king" because cotton gave control of 
money in the South. Control of money inaccessible 
to the people supports aristocratic institutions in 
England as it did chattel slavery in the old South. 
Must we not pursue a different policy if we wish to 
maintain republican institutions? 

Disintegration, or antagonism of interests, being the 
support of monarchy, its opposite, concentrated unity 
of citizens with equitable individual interests, must 
be the corner-stone of republican solidity and strength. 
Instead of merely getting the results of manual labor, 
as in monarchies and states with chattel slavery, we 
must have each and every individual ability developed 
to its highest capacity, or power, through education 
and public assistance. 

In the first place, we must see that each man has a 
sufS.cient supply of wholesome food to be eaten in a 
well- ventilated domicil, and must not be so physically 
exhausted that he craves animal excitement by use of 



SOCIAL AERANGEMEXTS. 69 

alcoholic stimulants. His work must not exceed the 
limits of healthy exercise, the safeguard of a good 
mental condition. 

With these surroundings the individual can take 
care of himself, but many will ask, How are you going 
to "bell the cat," to give every man such a home? 
It cannot be done in a daj^, and it is not desirable so 
to do it. All social changes to be beneficial must be 
gradual ; the individual must grow with the change. 
But the idea is not so Utopian or impracticable as it 
appears to the unthinking devotee of old customs. In 
the first place, decrease the cost of money and trans- 
portation to the lowest limits, by cancellation of use- 
less debts, and by development of the home market, 
as has already been suggested. If these fail to do all 
that is necessary, make periodical additions to the pay 
of operatives. Let everything be done upon a settled 
plan, gradually, but permanently, so that it cannot be 
disturbed by ignorant demagogues who may swindle 
themselves into legislative halls. Do not fret about 
prices being advanced, as long as men are advanced. 
It is men that republics want and must have, and if 
it requires exclusion of low priced foreign products, 
exclude them, but there is no reason for excluding 
voluntary immigrants who want to identify themselves 
with our institutions, for every such immigrant will 
be a consumer to the full extent of his productive 
ability. Imports of contracted labor at European 
standard of prices should be treated as felony, but the 
turbulent behavior of those who have been imported 
will most likely cure this evil and prevent further 

importations. 

7* 



70 SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS. 

It is cheaper to pay prices insuring comfortable 
homes than it is to pay English prices and have En- 
glish prisons, almshouses, poor-rates, and an ignorant, 
degraded population. Poor food and unhealthy homes 
produce diseases that are not confined to their own 
locality, but send the germs of malaria that enter 
homes of the more fortunate of our citizens who have 
made every sanitary precaution for themselves, but 
neglected to preserve their neighbors from interfering 
with him. 

There is in the minds of many, especially the credi- 
tor class, a holy horror of idle money, but who 
have not the slightest anxiety or care a^Dout having 
idle men in the community. 

Idle money is harmless, but idle men are both 
dangerous and expensive, and until every man is fully 
employed there is not any danger of an excess of 
money. When such a phenomenon occurs as a sur- 
plus of money, which has never yet occurred, it can 
be put away for the time when the progressed com- 
munity will want it, like the farmer keeps his Sun- 
day carriage, while he rides in his wagon during the 
week. 

There is another bad feature in our social system 
that must be abolished — taxing industry and reward- 
ing idleness. For illustration. Two men take up a 
piece of public land, the one improves his until the 
district assessor puts it on the taxable list of properties, 
but the other one develops his land so little that it 
is scarcely worth taxing, though the idler receives 
equal legal protection with the industrious one, and 
the latter, in consequence of his industry, has to pay 



SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS. 71 

taxes for protecting the idler, who is unable to pay 
anything. The assessor should say to the owner of 
the developed farm : "The government will lend you 
its credit to half the assessed amount of your farm, 
in recognition of your having increased the productive 
wealth of the nation, but as public expenses have to 
be provided for, a tax will be levied upon the loan in 
lieu of any claim for interest. If you continue to in- 
crease the value of your farm, there will not be an 
increase of taxation, as the government only asks 
compensation for services rendered hy it and not for 
services rendered to it." 

With the aid of this loan the industrious man can, 
by purchase of improved machinery, etc., lessen phy- 
sical fatigue and command that leisure which stimu- 
lates mental improvement. He has a comfortable 
home which the idler cannot fail to contrast with his 
shanty ; knowing that his reward will be the same for 
similar service, he is induced to convert idleness into 
productive industry, to his own benefit as well as that 
of the community. 

Because a thing has not been is not a reason why 
it should not be. We are surrounded with discordant 
conditions produced by errors which must be har- 
monized by truthful measures. 



72 



LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 

It is computed by competent authorities that more 
than three-fifths of all the improved land in the 
United States are under bond and mortgage debt, 
bearing from four to ten per cent, annual interest. 
In addition to this specific pledge we have Federal, 
State, and municipal bonds, pledged upon all forms of 
property, real and personal. 

Are these Debts to he in Perpetuity ? 

An examination into the origin of the mortgage 
debt upon land discloses the fact that such mortgages 
were given by individuals to obtain possession and 
control of definitely defined portions of land, which at 
the time had not a representative equivalent value in 
any form of debt-paying agent. Land thus became 
monetized and entitled to draw interest as money. 
Many of the original mortgages have been cancelled ; 
but as the debt-paying agent has always been less 
in amount than the debts due, every such cancellation 
was only a transfer to some other property by another 
individual. The gross amount of debt first incurred 
has not been decreased, and under present arrange- 
ments there is not the slightest prospect of its ever 
being cancelled. 

Are not such mortgages but a continuance of land 



LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 73 

feudalism in a more subtle, but not less oppressive, 
form than the old one of manual or militarj?- service ? 
The first mortgagees of this land held their title by 
virtue of royal warrants precisely as the Norman 
pirates obtained their titles under William the Con- 
queror ; but as the founders of our republic accepted 
the situation, we must do the same, and acknowledge 
the validity of present titles ; but accepting the errors 
of the past does not preclude the right to correct them 
in the future. 

Law and custom having for more than a century 
sanctioned the monetization of land as a means of 
creating interest-bearing debt, has not law an equal 
right to monetize land to pay off the debt ? 

It is utterly absurd to assert that mortgage or any 
other form of debt, has a right to claim payment in 
any material other than the material obtained by the 
debt. A return of the land has at all times the right 
to cancel the mortgage. As every debt is created in 
obtaining land, production, or service, the debt can 
equitably demand payment only in the same material 
or equivalent service. This assertion is thoroughly 
demonstrated by the actual practice in our daily 
transactions, where one form of debt balances another 
form of debt. A man becomes a debtor for a pair of 
shoes, and he gives the shoemaker a mortgage given 
by a tanner, hatter, tailor, or some other member of 
the community, and his debt for the shoes is can- 
celled. 

If the original mortgagor had given his feudal credi- 
tor one thousand mortgages of one dollar each, instead 
of the one mortgage for a thousand dollars, he would 



74 LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 

not have increased his debt to the extent of a single 
cent, and each one dollar mortgage would have as good 
a security for its debt face as the thousand dollar 
mortgage, with the additional advantage that some 
of them could be redeemed by the debtor's produc- 
tions or services which otherwise would be lost. 

It would not be practical for each individual to 
mortgage his own property, production, or service 
with which to cancel his debts, but the united voice 
of the people can authorize its National Congress to 
issue mortgages in denominations convenient for in- 
dividual use, based upon and redeemable in any or 
every form of property, production, or service within 
the jurisdiction of the United States. 

As it is law that enforces obedience to the terms of 
the mortgage, should the debtor default, so is it law 
that can enforce redemption of the debt issued by 
public authority, but experience proves that our last 
issue of government mortgages, known as Greenbacks, 
were most greedily sought after by the people for 
redemption by their production and services. It was 
not necessary to ring a sheriff's bell to make sales to 
redeem Greenbacks, as is the case under mortgage 
debt, when there are not Greenbacks to represent it. 
Every man was his own sheriff'. 

Legal authority to enforce the payment of debts 
carries with it the duty of providing a supply of a 
debt-paying agent, in default of which our States have 
several times enacted stay laws to prevent excessive 
sacrifices on the part of the unfortunate debtors. 
This plan gave temporary relief to the debtor, with 
great damage at times to the creditor, who was thus 



LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 75 

prevented from paying his debts. The reason why 
legal authority does not supply the means to enable 
citizens to obey the law will be found in the article 
entitled "Intrinsic Yalue," where the creditors of the 
people claim that gold is the only representative of 
value and consequently the only legal debt-paying 
instrument. As long as legal authority obeys the 
banker's edict there remains but one honest duty on 
the part of law, to abolish all decrees for collection of 
debts, and let the debtor and creditor fight it out the 
best way they can. Law is bound to protect the 
debtor as well as the creditor which it fails to do to- 
day. Protect neither or both. 

The steady increase in the volume of bonded debt 
in the form of car trust loans and other bonds has 
arrested the attention of some of our more thoughtful 
and intelligent citizens, but the evil can only be cured 
by the people as a "committee of the whole," instruct- 
ing their legislators to supply a sufficient amount of 
money. Every dollar of interest has to he paid before 
one dollar of wages is paid, so the great body of indus- 
trial producers are directly interested in reduction of 
interest-bearing debt, and until they accomplish some 
plan for complete extinction of interest-bearing debt, 
their so-called labor organizations are mere bags of 
wind, and will collapse as soon as the banks stick a 
pin in them. 

The most feasible plan is for Congress to commence 
purchasing the existing mortgages according to their 
priority of date, by issue of an United States legal stand- 
ard of payment ; not a promise to pay gold, silver, or 
other form of money, but actual money itself, to do 



76 LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 

all that any form of money can do, i. e., exchange one 
commodity or service for another commodity or ser- 
vice. This standard of payment should be composed 
largely of one, two, and five dollar notes, and a mode- 
rate amonnt of subdivisions of a dollar. From ten to 
fifteen millions of dollars of this standard of payment 
can be monthly ejected into business arteries without 
serious disturbance to commercial prices, because the 
real money getting into circulation would substitute 
itself for the bank credits now used as money, and 
thus gradually would a present necessary evil be 
transplanted by a positive good. Uncle Sam having 
possession of the mortgages, could charge an annual 
commission of one per cent, to pay expenses of main- 
taining this true "labor bureau," which the debtor 
would cheerfully pay in exchange for the onerous 
burden of interest paid by him at present. 

Custom having sanctioned the paying of interest 
for use of money, it is perfect equity to demand that 
money paid as interest should in its turn receive in- 
terest, to be credited against debt principal. This 
equitable plan prevailed in monarchical Prussia be- 
fore its absorption into the present Germany, whereby 
a land owner could borrow twenty years' rental of 
his property at four per cent, interest. Eighteen an- 
nual payments of interest cancelled the debt. For 
example : A mortgage loan of $2000 would be can- 
celled by eighteen payments of $80 — amount of one 
year's interest at four per cent. The rate of interest 
was only a question of convenience, as the number of 
interest payments decreased with advance of rate. A 



LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 77 

six per cent, bond expiring in about two-thirds of the 
time required to cancel a four per cent. bond. 

If monarchical Prussia could do so much for her 
subjects, certainly democratic United States could and 
should do as much for her citizens. Our building 
and loan associations are based upon this equitable 
principle, but there are so many contingent risks at- 
tending their management that many of them do more 
harm than good. Yalues of property are too depend- 
ent upon the volume of bank credit to allow of time 
contracts being made with certainty. The unfortu- 
nate debtor frequently seeing his property sold for 
the amount due upon it after he had paid several 
years' dues into the association, not for any fault of 
his or of the association, but because neither he nor 
the association had control of the agent that exerts 
so much influence upon valuation as the volume of 
money does. 

Had this equitable principle — of interest earning 
interest— been developed when we first began build- 
ing our railroads, how much cheaper would our coal 
and transport charges be to-day ? 

When an adjustment of the money troubles of the 
Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company takes 
place, it will be time to make the calculation whether 
the creditors would not have made more money by 
equity than they will make by enforcement of the 
usury charged under the present arrangement. 

Not only can their innovations upon old bad habits 

be carried out, but there is a positive necessity that 

they shall be carried out. If every labor organization 

will determinedly and politely tell their congressional 

8 



78 LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 

representatives that upon this subject they are posi- 
tively united, there is not a congressman, nor a pros- 
pective candidate for one, who will dare to refuse 
their demand. But if our labor men — as they call 
themselves — are to continue their old custom of bel- 
lowing like bulls in convention and baa-ing like sheep 
on election day, they will never accomplish any im- 
provement over their present surroundings. 

It is the youug men now coming to the front who 
must undertake the duty of completing their coun- 
try's emancipation from feudal oppression left unfin- 
ished by their ancestors, the patriotic founders of our 
government. It was by severe physical suffering they 
earned the right for their descendants to make im- 
provements as experience diistated them, and it is 
gross moral cowardice to neglect what was so nobly 
won. 

There is not any use of asking this or that party to 
put such a plank in its platform. The true objective 
point of attack is the individual candidate himself, 
and when he sees intelligent resolution determined 
to accomplish its object, he will be obedient. When 
citizens will discuss ideas, and select men to represent 
them, we will have a government of the People, and 
not before. The social evils of the day are dividing 
old party lines in the remedies proposed for public 
relief, as witness the silver coinage question, which 
congressmen will not permit to come to a positive 
vote if they can possibly prevent it. There is no 
doubt that the free coinage of silver would give tem- 
porary relief to the debtor class, but as production of 



LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 79 

silver is an uncertainty, it cannot afford permanent 
relief to a progressive people, because silver itself is 
dependent upon production of man's industry for re- 
demption or value. 

There is not, in the opinion of the writer, a member 
of the present Congress better versed in the social 
problem of the daj^, and one more honestly devoted 
to emancipation of the debtor class, than Congress- 
man Brum, of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and 
without consultation with him, or asking his consent, 
the writer respectfully suggests that he be made the 
central point of present organization, and for the time 
the leader in the proposed scheme for cancellation of 
debt. 

The money disbursed among the people in paying 
off the mortgage debt upon land will largely aid the 
people in freeing themselves from the burdens im- 
posed by other forms of bonded debt. The Eeports 
of the Pennsylvania Eailroad Company show that the 
expenses of the road are about sixty per cent, of re- 
ceipts, leaving forty per cent, to be absorbed by bond 
interest and stock dividends. As this road is typical 
of all the other trans-continental trunk lines, some, 
idea can be formed of the enormous tax upon industry 
in the form of transportation, without the prospect of 
its decrease under present arrangements. 

Independent of pecuniary considerations, cancel- 
lation of debt is positively demanded upon moral- 
grounds, because debt is one of the most potent stim- 
ulators of crime ; especially is it active in driving 
people to the use of alcoholic stimulants in response 
to the exciting and exhaustive anxieties to find means 



80 LIQUIDATION OF BONDED DEBT. 

to meet obligations. Court records show that rum 
and crime are more rampant in what are called hard 
times — difficulty in paying debts — than in good times 
— ready payment of debts. Why not create perpe- 
tuity of good times in place of a perpetuity of debt ? 



81 



POLITICAL ACTION. 

Individual success in business is so dependent 
upon general success of tlie community that it is gross 
stupidity to neglect intelligent study of the effects of 
national legislation, yet the great body of business 
men, be they engaged at the bench, mill, or in the 
counting-house, scarcely ever look beyond their imme- 
diate surroundings. This inattention to political duties 
on the part of individual citizens has created a new 
class of industry, known as politicians, that has be- 
come an important factor in legislative proceedings. 
These politicians have their election machinery so 
well organized, and know so well who are the incon- 
siderate voters on whom they can rely, that it is 
almost an absurdity for an inexperienced and unor- 
ganized class of citizens to attempt to defeat them. 
These politicians are dealers in public opinion, and 
try to shape their expressions of political principles 
as nearly as possible to what they think is the most 
popular. Their own principle is themselves, and, like 
the chameleon, turn to the color of the opinion that 
will feed them best. 

Under this arrangement, the best practical way to 
get new ideas into legislation is to manufacture public 
opinion through social discussions, free from prejudice 
engendered by partisan spirit. Leaders of political 

8* 



82 POLITICAL ACTION. 

parties keep close watch upon growth and change of 
public opinion, 'and can tell almost to a dot how many 
votes a new idea will get when it enters the political 
arena as a distinct political party. These political 
leaders can measure popular demonstrations just as a 
good mechanic can measure the effective force of a 
machine. How often have we seen thousands gathered 
in the name of labor, with music, speeches, parade, etc., 
yet on the day of election the votes amount only to a 
few score. Popular demonstrations rarely carry the 
positive and permanent conviction that a quiet and 
friendly discussion between chums will produce, of 
which fact the political leaders are perfectly con- 
versant, and they produce demonstrations as frothy 
and unreal to counteract the other demonstrations. 

Excitement may be substituted for reason in a 
circus or other place of amusement, but reason must 
prevail over excitement when citizens are to deter- 
mine upon measures best calculated to bring happy 
home surroundings. In the accompanying essays I 
have endeavored to suggest thoughts, not to formulate 
a platform, nor organize a new party, because the 
right and duty to do such things belong to the com- 
munity, of which I am only one integer and unknown 
to the public. Organized movements, to be successful, 
must begin with a few who know exactly what they 
want to do, and have perfect confidence in each other. 
Gradually drawing in new associates of the same 
stamp, creates a power that will win public confidence, 
if judiciously and honestly managed upon broad prin- 
ciples of equity, and free from the stupid selfishness 
of what are called trades unions. The moment one 



POLITICAL ACTION. 83 

man says to anotlier, " you sha'n't," it is only a ques- 
tion of strength whether the other shall not retort, 
and say, "you sha'n't." The "sha'n't" system never 
accomplishes a permanent good. 

Physical exhaustion by manual labor and mental 
exhaustion incurred by competition in business have 
the same tendency to ignore the study of economic 
principles, and it is difficult to decide which is the 
more ignorant class of the two, employers or employed. 
But the banker having control of the situation is free 
from anxiety, and can study the effects of fiscal legis- 
lation and formulate congressional bills to his advan- 
tage. Business men must protect themselves against 
this bank tyranny by having some one to study finan- 
cial laws in their behalf. These students of social 
science are, or should be, the wives and daughters of 
business men having means to free their family from 
household drudgery. Free from partisan strife and 
honestly looking only to discover truth, they could 
elucidate a true idea in a few minutes that had prob- 
ably taken them considerable time to determine upon, 
a time which their husbands or brothers would never 
take from business to do. Through this channel 
female influence upon legislation will be more speedily 
and more potently effected, than by women stulti- 
fying their great intuitive faculties by partisan ex- 
citement. In voting, they cannot avoid identifying 
themselves with one of the parties, and the pride ol 
party success will make them hob-nob with discordant 
parasites to win an apparent victory, just as men do 
now. If the Democratic party was to repudiate the 
rum interest the party would be largely in the 



84 POLITICAL ACTION. 

minority, and to secure a majority at the polls many 
good temperance Democrats will wink at the alliance 
with the rum-seller. It was so in the days of slavery: 
thousands of Democrats did not like slavery, but with- 
out the slave- owner their party was a skeleton regi- 
ment. If women enter the political arena, the number 
of voters will be increased without any improvement 
in politics. 

The influence of women teaching the present rising 
generation need not stop because the boy leaves the 
grammar school. One hour a week devoted at home 
to an honest comparison of the economic condition of 
his own country with the attendant political policy, 
■under the guidance of an intelligent mother, or elder 
sister, would bend the twig to make a straighter tree. 
It is woman's influence that keeps up the churches, 
not through the ballot-box, but through the social 
circle, and through the same channel they can stimu- 
late higher political sentiments. It is not desirable 
to make homes cock-pits for senseless political party 
wrangles, but when a wife can, at convenient moments, 
make an intelligent exposition to her husband of the 
political surroundings, when his business was pros- 
perous, and what they were, or are, when business is 
otherwise, the number of men who will not sacrifice 
party partialities for business success is so small as 
hardly worthy of mention. 

Neither of the present contending factions has a 
clean record in regard to business prosperity. Under 
a Kepublican President and Congress the country suf- 
fered in 1873 one of the most disastrous panics and 
industrial prostrations ever experienced in our his- 



POLITICAL ACTION. 85 

tory, while the present discordant conditions are 
largely due to the action of a Eepublican Congress in 
March 3, 1883, which was largely aided by many 
Democrats. The Democratic administrations of Jack- 
son and Van Buren, from 1828 to 1840, brought public 
and private bankruptcy, which was restored under a 
change of administration by the tariff act of 1842, to 
be again demolished by the tariff act of 1846, and 
making the country ripe for the rebellion of 1861, 
which had been smouldering since 1832. These are 
historical facts that will not down, and taken in con- 
nection with the utter imbecility displayed by Presi- 
dent Cleveland, in his message regarding the labor 
disturbances, proves the necessity of some new de- 
parture in political manipulations. 

The fact that certain localities give constant majori- 
ties for one or other of the two parties proves how 
largely men are influenced by personal antecedents 
and family connections. These predilections can only 
be changed by non-partisan teachers, more devoted 
to truth than to party success, and if women will 
devote themselves to this duty, and cease their silly 
attempt to degrade themselves at the polls, they will 
be true guardians of the future of our republic. 

When citizens have to ask, " What will Congress 
do?" there is not much of a people's government 
about such a Congress. The people themselves must 
legislate, and elect their representatives to formulate 
the bill with necessary details. 

When banks, Cobden clubs, and the candidates 
themselves pay the expenses of elections, the people 
have not much right to expect legislation beyond 



86 POLITICAL ACTION. 

personal benefit of the elected. A representative 
worth having is worth paying for. A free ballot is 
like a free lunch, there is poison behind it. 

No single idea can ever establish a new political 
party when there are so many noxious weeds to be 
eradicated from the body politic. With some voters 
the rum question is paramount to all others; with 
others, the tariff question, and with others, the money 
question. These divisions are all made among the 
intelligent, thinking voters, leaving to the routine 
voter an easy victory for continuance of old evils. 
Women's teaching at the home circle would unite Dem- 
ocrat and Eepublican upon a higher political plane, 
and create a distinct demarcation between truth and 
error that could not fail of success on the right side. 
Business education of men teaches them better how to 
apply means to accomplish an end than women can 
ever learn in the domestic life. When men know the 
truth they will develop it through business inter- 
course. The leading member of any business firm, 
when possessed with a high moral tone of character, 
carries an immense influence for good upon every one 
he comes in contact with, and these are the men who 
should be sent to legislative halls, but such men will 
not go as representatives unless the constituency is 
ready to send them. They will neither ask to be 
sent, nor intrigue to be elected, the public must elect 
them. 



87 



DEDICATION. 

AuTHOKiTY to perform an act does not in itself 
necessarily confer upon the grantee the wisdom or 
ability to execute it, and until this ability is developed, 
an unwise exercise of the authority may produce more 
mischief than benefit. Our Declaration of Indepen- 
dence gave the authority to create a republic. It 
was all it could do at the time ; the people were to do 
the work, and as far as they knew they did the best 
they could, but the experience of a century demon- 
strates that the ability was not commensurate with 
the authority. Too much stress has been laid upon 
changes of political names and forms, with almost 
total neglect of the means whereby the individual can 
combine with his fellow-citizens to create a union 
strong in itself, and capable to protect and develop 
the individual. 

Monarchical power grants privileges to subjects ; 
republican citizens grant privileges to public power. 
Such antipodal systems cannot possibly be maintained 
by the exercise of the same means. One or the other 
must give way, and unfortunately for us our grand- 
fathers adopted the process for crushing individual 
development when they adopted the Common Law of 
England, Avhich contains the poison of measuring man 
by property. It is against this chattel enslavement 
of man that the present antagonistic movements in 



88 DEDICATION. 

industrial circles are directed, but until the macfii- 
nerj is removed that produces the noxious power, the 
power cannot be destroyed. We cannot run a repub- 
lican locomotive upon monarchical rails. 

With the view to induce the young men of the 
United States to examine into the errors of the domi- 
nant dogmas of the day these accompanying essays 
have been written. They do not formulate any espe- 
cial drill-manual of reform, because communities must 
do their own reforming according to their capacities. 
All that individual effort can do is to suggest thoughts 
in the minds of others, where, if the seed be good, good 
will result. 

Old dogs will not learn new tricks, neither will men 
occupying social and political influential positions dis- 
turb their opinions with the intrusion of new ideas. 
The work of making a true republic depends upon 
the Young Men of the United States; to whom I 
most respectfully dedicate these preliminary essays. 

WALTER S. WALDIE. 

Philadelphia, May, 1886. 



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